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“Really? I don't know precisely what evidence she presented but any court that wouldn't accept someone like Mara Zebest as an expert on Adobe Software needs to be dissolved.

Some things are just obvious when presented too, whether they are presented by someone who has devoted his life to something, or by his secretary. So when the secretary shows enlargements of characters that were all supposed to have been produced by the same typewriter key that obviously were not, it seems absurd to me to reject out of hand what the secretary has shown.”

This is a common fallacy. Many people may have extensive experience in certain areas. That does not make them an expert for all questions. I've gotten much more “expertise” in this question myself late in my career as fate wound up steering me into certain aspects of safety and environmental law defending businesses.

Liberal environmental groups routinely do exactly what Orly is doing. It's a mistake that comes in either of two primary flavors: (1) representing run-of-the-mill people with axes to grind as “experts,” and (2) finding sympathetic people with meaningful backgrounds in one field who they lure over the line into another field. I have found they tend to do this for two reasons as well. First, not being versed in technical matters, they tend to be gullible. That is, it's not so much deliberate misrepresentation (although you occasionally get that)as that they honestly don't know the diffference. Second, they believe so wholeheartedly in their cause they can't objectively evaluate the case they are trying to make.

You would think they'd learn (and again, a few do), but when one believes so completely in a cause, I've observed it continues to cloud their augment. They respond exactly as Orly does. To them, it's not that they prepared a poor case and presented it poorly. It's that I and the uncaring businesses I represent are evil, corrupt Republican SOBs, the judges have all been bought off, etc.

Sound familiar? It's not that attorneys like me deliberately want to mock your beliefs. It's just that we've seen this pattern so many times, from both sides. I've been subjected to all the insults by the other side, and I've had to drop clients who have the same failing. They can't give up their belief about what the facts and the law ought to be instead of facing what they are. Thus, there's nothing I can do for them, and I'm not just going to take their money for nothing.

Given her poor skills, her constant lack of professionalism in court, and the hopeless nature of the briefs she writes, I find Orly unethical in the extreme, particularly in the way she solicits money from the gullible on a pipe dream. Far from being “Lady Liberty” she is the very worst type of lawyer—an incompetent ambulance chaser. And if that offends you, I'm sorry, but every ambulance chaser has a line of BS about how nobly they are serving some cause.

In this case, Mara Zebest is not a forensic digital image analyst. The act of scanning a document into a PDF introduces digital alterations into it, so she is certainly correct that the image has digital alterations. That's a point any novice computer user could verify. But those alterations don't mean either the image or the underlying document are forgeries. She does nothing to demonstrate that they are, because, not being a forensic digital image or document analysts, she presumably doesn't know how they go about doing that. Her experience with Adobe is irrelevant to the court. In particular, her conclusion that she believes the certificate image in question was created on Photoshop means nothing. Her “belief” is irrelevant given that the PDF data identifies the actual program used to create the PDF, and it ain't Adobe. And that Obama released a copy of the document that the state of Hawaii stands behind. The full faith and credit clause trumps the idle musings of an Adobe professional straying well outside her field of expertise.