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In this study we replicated and extended Wetter and Corrigan's ( 1995 ) commonly cited convenience survey of attorneys and law students regarding their attitudes toward coaching litigants prior to forensic psychological testing. We conducted a target survey of attorneys practicing in specialty areas of law where it is common to enlist psychological testing as part of legal proceedings (family law, juvenile law, personal injury, criminal law, social security/disability, workman's compensation). The estimated prevalence of attorneys who endorse providing their clients with information about the presence of MMPI-2 validity scales is 53%, with a 95% confidence interval of ±7%. Compared with Wetter and Corrigan's results of 63%, this represents a slightly lower estimate of attorneys who indicate a positive attitude toward coaching their clients on the presence and purpose of validity scales. More than 70% of attorneys, in both surveys, believe they should provide general advice and preparation for psychological testing to their clients. Survey results were further analyzed as a function of attorney age, years in practice, and specialty area. Implications are discussed in relation to future research and the practice of forensic psychological evaluations.

The motivation for this work is straight-forward — simply put, there is need in the upstream oil and gas industry to properly forecast production rate performance in unconventional reservoirs. At present, this need is being met by an ever-growing inventory of time-rate (decline curve analysis (or, DCA)) relations of various constructs and purposes — this has led to inconsistent and somewhat contradictory results. The overall purpose of this work is to put forth an examination of the validity of the most common of these time-rate models via the use of high-resolution reservoir simulation. As such, this work is constructed in 2 parts. The first part of this work is focused on the creation of a very high precision reservoir simulation model that is of sufficient accuracy and flexibility to model the well performance for the primary types of unconventional reservoirs (e.g., gas-water and oil-gas-water systems). The reservoir simulation model is validated against analytical models for the single-phase case (to ensure validity), then tested with numerous synthetic field cases (to ensure applicability to most types of unconventional reservoir systems). The second part of this work focuses on the use of the common DCA relations (Arp's Modified Hyperbolic model, the stretched/power law exponential model, the Duong model, and the Logistical Growth model (a population model)) to correlate against reservoir simulation results to establish the "most appropriate" model(s) for which to history match actual field cases. Based on the synthetic performance cases considered in the first portion of this work, a new time-rate (DCA) model is proposed based on the K1(x) Bessel Function (i.e., the Modified Bessel Function of the second kind). In form, this result is quite compact and has the general performance characteristics of the modified-hyperbolic model at early times and the stretched/power law exponential model(s) at intermediate and late times — that is, the rate and the decline parameters D(t) and b(t) for the K1X model closely match these functions for the aforementioned DCA models and the reservoir simulation performance results. In this sense, the K1X model is a sort of "hybrid" which represents the combined behavior of the modified-hyperbolic model and the stretched/power law exponential model(s).

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