In litigation, an expert report can be priceless. In a lawsuit filed in federal court in late June, an author argues that she knows exactly how much her work is worth.
A Texas-based researcher named Lindsay Olson, who operates a firm that provides jury‑bias studies, has sued attorney T. Brent Mayr and Mayr Law, P.C. in a copyright case arising out of January 6 criminal prosecutions. Olson claims Mayr copied her jury‑bias reports from federal court records and used them as exhibits in a motion to transfer venue without paying the licensing fees she charges other defense teams.
According to the complaint, Olson seeks a preliminary injunction to stop Mayr from using her reports again, plus actual damages equal to the licensing fees she says he should have paid. She also asks the court to award statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work if a jury finds that Mayr willfully violated her copyrights, along with any gains, profits, or advantages he allegedly obtained from using the reports in his filings.
Olson further alleges that Mayr’s actions are causing her ongoing “irreparable damage,” but that claim may be difficult to prove to a jury. Many January 6 prosecutions have already been resolved through guilty pleas or trials, which means fewer new cases are seeking venue‑transfer expert reports now than at the height of the docket. With that shrinking pool of potential clients, jurors may question how much future business she realistically lost from the alleged infringement.
How Olson’s Jury-Bias Reports Work
Federal prosecutors have charged more than 1,000 people in connection with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. While many defendants accepted plea deals, others went to trial and raised concerns that jurors drawn from Washington, D.C. would be too biased against them to deliver a fair verdict.
In April 2022, Olson produced an expert report titled “Multi-District Comparative Community Attitude Study” for the legal team representing members of the Oath Keepers at trial. Olson’s report collected and analyzed data suggesting that members of the District of Columbia jury pools would carry an extreme bias against J6 defendants. The defense paid Olson $30,000 to license the report, which was used to support its motion for venue transfer.
Olson has described her work as involving a “creative spark” and a “modicum of intellectual labor,” arguing that her particular selection of questions, methodology, and analysis makes the reports original, copyright‑protected works. Because the report was not limited to a single defendant, she says she was able to license versions of the same or similar study to other January 6 defense teams for additional fees in the $25,000–$30,000 range.
Olson applied for copyright protection for both reports with the U.S. Copyright Office on December 8, 2022. As part of their filings, her clients attached copies of the reports and uploaded them to PACER, where they became publicly viewable. Her lawsuit alleges that in mid-July 2023, Mayr downloaded copies of her reports and attached them to support his J6 clients' Motions for Venue Transfer. Olson’s attorney sent a DMCA cease-and-desist letter along with a notice demanding payment. Mayr responded but declined to make any payments.
How PACER Entered the Picture
Olson’s lawsuit against Mayr focuses on what happened after her reports appeared on PACER. In her telling, Mayr later accessed the criminal case docket, downloaded the expert reports, and attached them to venue‑transfer motions for his own January 6 clients without ever contacting her or purchasing a license.
Court records show that Olson has filed multiple copyright lawsuits in different courts against various January 6 defense attorneys, all raising the same core allegation: that lawyers “pirated” her expert report by copying it from the public docket and reusing it as a paid expert product without permission. In each case, she contends that the lawyers should have treated her reports like other expert work, which would have required them to pay market rates rather than simply recycling someone else’s filing. As yet, it does not appear that any of these previous suits has reached a final resolution on the merits.
After discovering Mayr’s use of the reports, Olson’s attorney sent a cease‑and‑desist letter citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and demanding payment of her licensing fees. The complaint alleges that Mayr responded but declined to pay, prompting Olson to pursue litigation instead.
Wait … Isn’t Everything on the Internet Free?
Olson’s lawsuit charges Mayr with multiple counts of copyright infringement under federal law, claiming unauthorized copying, public distribution, and public display in filing without a license. Mayr and other defendants in related suits have argued that they simply used materials that were already on the public docket, raising questions about how copyright law applies to documents downloaded from PACER. Courts have generally held that copyright protection applies to written works even when they are filed as exhibits or reports in litigation, and that copying them wholesale for similar commercial use can still constitute infringement.
Olson’s complaints also try to head off any fair use defense. She argues that the lawyers’ wholesale reuse of her reports is not transformative, that the reports are core to her commercial business, and that copying them for use in other defendants’ venue‑transfer motions directly competes with her market for paid licenses. To support this argument, she cites rulings that have rejected fair use in cases involving extensive copying of expert analysis or legal content used for similar commercial purposes.
Olson contends that downloading and re‑filing her reports from PACER is not fair use and that defense lawyers must either obtain a license or commission their own expert studies rather than repurposing her copyrighted work. As litigation over AI training data and other large‑scale copying of online content moves forward, her cases add another twist to the broader debate over how copyright applies to digital information that is easy to access but not necessarily free to reuse.
