Sarbanes-Oxley has not only resulted in boom times for accountants.

It's also helped create an expert witness industry worth $6 to $8 billion a year. Experts are charging anything from $650,000 for over 1000 hours of work, to rates that go up to $1000 an hour, to one ex-Ford engineer who has raked in $22 million from 2002 to 2005 from his former employer, according to this report.

Clearly, most of us have chosen the wrong job!

Part of the growth is the result of the litigiousness of US business and society with the average American corporation now facing 37 lawsuits at any given time.

But it's also a side-effect of Sarbanes-Oxley. Up until Sarbanes-Oxley, the big accounting firms had litigation service units but when the law came in preventing conflicts of interest from non-audit work, people became free agents and independent consultants, some of them even banding together to form expert witness firms.

No doubt expert witnesses will play a big role in the lawsuits against the telcos for handing customer info over to the US government.

Already, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is seeking the unsealing of expert witness testimony from a former senior adviser to the Federal Communication Commission on Internet technology, according to this report.

If form of the experts industry is anything to go by, there should be plenty more.