Articles Posted in Researching Experts

As a practicing lawyer, clients may scrutinize every expense and hour you bill in their case. The key to avoiding billing surprises with your clients is to communicate your billing practices. While money has to be considered in hiring an expert witness, it is not the best place to cut costs. Advise your client not to expect experts to discount their fees. A good expert witness is not a bargain expert witness.

Expert witnesses have the education, training, and experience that makes them knowledgeable in their field. While it is understandable that clients want to keep litigation costs to a minimum, in order to win their case, it is advisable not to cut expert witness costs.

Philip Michels, a plaintiff’s lawyer at Michels & Watkins in Westwood, California, has written an excellent article entitled “Finding and effectively using experts in a professional medical negligence case.” The article appears in the April 2007 of the Advocate magazine, published by the Counsumer Attorneys Associations for Southern California.

In the article, Michels suggests one way to select medical experts is to match the defense experts specialty for speciality. As he states in the article:

“[Y]our have to be cautious about allowing the defense to have a specialist in an area that you do not have adequately covered. You can easily drop an expert witness; it is far more difficult to list an additional one.”

A preliminary understanding and some basic investigation of the topic of expertise will allow the researcher to know what questions to ask the potential expert witness, and may also lead to the names of good potential experts in that field.

Library web sites are an excellent place to begin the search to find information about the subject matter and to find potential experts. Start by searching their online catalogs for books and journals on your subject. Pay particular attention to whom the author/authors are – someone who writes extensively on the subject you are researching may make an ideal candidate to serve as an expert in your case.

Note that many library web sites allow the researcher to search their catalog for specific topics. For example, a basic search on the Library of Congress’s web site using the term “handwriting identification” will return hundreds of books and other publications written by potential handwriting expert witnesses. These results include not only the potential expert’s name, but also the title and date of publication, where it was published, and cross-references to other works by that author. Such information can be used to find, or cross examine, an expert.

The story of the ballistics expert who killed himself after being confronted with evidence that he had lied about his credentials illustrates the importance of researching experts before they are retained.

Licensing information can be found online and is easily searched to verify the currently-held licenses claimed by an expert. Many organizations, such as the American Board of Surgery, have their own websites where one can check the licenses of experts. Search Systems links to over 35,000 public record databases. By running a search for the type of record (license), the jurisdiction (e.g.: Ohio), and the occupation (e.g.: accountant), the user is given a list of databases where the licensing information can be found. Using the metasite Portico , one can verify licenses for occupations such as doctors, contractors, architects and more.