It sounds like they called him in to give his opinion and he did that. I don't see how that is unhelpful. An employee's job is not to ensure that the employer gets its way no matter what.
My point was that everything they were they were trying to patent was an obvious trick of the trade. They were trying to patent thing along the lines of: generate->filter->rank. It's how basically any recommendation engine works and has been described in numerous existing patents.
But I tried not to be a jerk at all. Every time they asked me about a different aspect of the system, I could just say something like, "We used standard software engineering techniques using an algorithm built in to [common language] to sort things here. It's a fairly common approach to this sort of problem." After a statement like that, the patent lawyers had very little to pull on. They'd move on to another aspect and I'd give a similar answer.
