Whether you are about to retain an expert witness or about to cross-examine one, you want to learn everything you can about the expert’s experience and background. A new service, Expert Witness Profiler, helps you do exactly that. It provides you with a dossier that covers everything from the expert’s professional background and testimonial history to the expert’s social media profile and news coverage. More specifically, the profile includes:
- Testimonial history.
- Challenge (Daubert/Frye) history.
- Disciplinary history.
- Licensing and certifications (including verification).
- Educational background (including verification).
- Professional background.
- Associations and memberships.
- Personal information.
- Publications.
- Teaching and research.
- Patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
- References in news, blogs and social media.
When you purchase a profile, you receive a booklet covering the items listed above. Hyperlinks within the document take you to relevant cases, orders, and other documents. Where available, the document will also include transcripts, motions and briefs relating to the expert or to challenges to the expert. You can see a sample profile on the company’s website or download one in PDF.
According to the company, each report involves at least 20 hours of research by attorneys and professional legal researchers who have access to data not readily available to the public. It says its reports “deliver a deeper, broader and timelier result than if the legal professional attempted to acquire information about an expert on their own.”
Pricing of Profiles
To order a profile through the website, you first create an account, if you haven’t already, and then provide information about the expert. The cost of a single profile, delivered to you within 10 business days, is $450. Shorter delivery times cost more: $650 for five business days, $750 for two business days, and $900 for one-day turnaround. The company also offers volume discounts for purchases of 50 or more reports in a year.
Expert Witness Profiler was founded by Jim Robinson and Myles Levin. Robinson is an attorney and former litigator who was also the founder of JurisPro Inc., a free resource to find and research expert witnesses. Levin if the founder of The Daubert Tracker, an expert witness service whose central feature is a database of decisions interpreting and applying Daubert and its progeny. See my earlier reviews of The Daubert Tracker here and here. Information from The Daubert Tracker is incorporated into Expert Witness Profiler’s research.
By way of disclaimer, you will see if you visit the Expert Witness Profiler website that I am on the company’s advisory board. I have received no payment or compensation of any kind from the company and I have no stake in its performance, financial or otherwise. My service as an advisor consisted solely of providing feedback on the concept early on and additional feedback after launch.
To my mind, the cost of a profile is money well spent. At a lawyer’s hourly rate, you could not do this same depth of research or access the same variety of data sources for anywhere near the $450 price of a report. As I said at the outset, whether you are preparing to hire an expert or to cross-examine one, you should leave no stone unturned in investigating the expert’s background. Expert Witness Profiler can help prevent surprises regarding your own expert and may just provide the Achilles heel to undermine your opponent’s expert.