Civil Procedure

How to Find and Research Experts on the Internet

Carole Levitt is President of Internet For Lawyers (IFL) and is Vice-Chair of the California State Bar Association's LPMT Executive Board. She teaches attorneys how to use the Internet to its full extent for both research and for marketing. For more information about IFL, see <www.netforlawyers.com>. Tel 310-559-2247 or E-mail: clevitt@netforlawyers.com

Jim Robinson is president of JurisPro. JurisPro is a free resource for legal professionals that helps locate and evaluate expert witnesses. The company maintains a free online directory for expert witnesses <www.JurisPro.com> that includes the experts’ contact information, links to their websites, full curriculum vitae, photo and voice, articles, references, and prior litigation experience. Tel 1-888-905-4040 or E-mail: Jim@JurisPro.com

At one or more times in their careers, most trial attorneys will need to locate an expert witness for trial or pretrial consultation. Even if an expert is found by personal referral, thus avoiding a search from scratch, the chore of conducting a due diligence search to verify credentials and research their background is necessary and can be time consuming. Finding experts and checking their background, however, has now become less of a burden. Free online expert witness directories have made it easier to locate expert witnesses. Besides online directories, there are additional Internet resources to turn to such as usenet posts, discussion groups, jury verdicts, deposition transcripts, case law, trade or professional association sites and directories, library catalogs, indices to articles, and university sites.

Expert witness directory databases
There are many expert witness directories available on the Internet. On the free online expert witness directory JurisPro, website <www.JurisPro.com>, visitors can find experts in thousands of categories, see a photo of the expert, read the expert’s full CV and articles, and hear the expert speak through streaming audio. This allows the visitor to learn how that expert presents him or herself, as well as view their qualifications. If an expert cannot be found by searching the site, visitors are free to contact JurisPro directly at 888-905-4040 or e-mail info@JurisPro.com, and the JurisPro attorneys will help locate an expert for free.

Search trade or professional associations’ sites and directories online
Attorneys who need an expert in an uncommon field or who simply do not know where to start a search for an expert, can consult a database of associations. Some public libraries provide remote access to one of the largest of these association directories, The Encyclopedia of Associations. For example, Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) makes this directory accessible to anyone with a LAPL card <www.lapl.org> and an Internet connection. Using the Encyclopedia, one can find associations that specialize in almost any field. Trust us, we do mean any field—there are three associations just for the banana!

Academic & institutional sources
Experts, of course, abound in academia. To find any university’s URL, see Trackem <www.trackem.net> and scroll down to "College E-Mail Search Form". Many health care facilities and organizations have excellent directories for doctors. A directory of nearly 18,000 healthcare organizations can be found on the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations’ website <www.jcaho.org/qualitycheck/directry/directry.asp>.

Jury verdict reporter databases and case law
Jury verdict reporter databases, although selective since they contain only those verdicts that an attorney reports to the database publisher, can be useful for finding experts. Free online jury verdicts can be found at <www.Morelaw.com>. Paid jury verdict reporters can be found at the Daily Journal’s site <http://www.dailyjournal.com> and the National Association of State Jury Verdict Publishers’ (NASJVP) <www.juryverdicts.com/>. An expert’s name may also appear in a reported opinion and many reported opinions can be searched for free. For free case law searching, try LexisOne <www.lexisone.com> or Findlaw <www.findlaw.com>. To search for a police officer who is a gang expert, for example, search the case law in your jurisdiction with those key terms and you might just find the perfect gang expert.

Locate and read the expert’s prior deposition testimony
Reading an expert’s deposition testimony can provide an abundance of information about how the expert may perform. However, there is currently no free, centralized database for expert witness transcripts. At TrialSmith <www.trialsmith.com> formerly known as DepoConnect, plaintiffs’ attorneys can access over 73,000 online documents that include depositions and also briefs, pleadings, seminar papers, verdicts, and settlements. For defense attorneys, full text copies of transcripts are available for a fee from Idex <www.Idex.com>. According to its website, 6,000 records are added each month to Idex’s database of over 800,000 records of expert involvement.

Avoid being bitten – has the expert’s opinion been consistent?
Once a potential expert witness has been located, you can research their past to see if there are any "skeletons in their closet." It is important to learn if an expert’s opinion has been consistent in public forums, such as at conferences where they spoke, in online discussion groups (both the expert’s messages to the group and any references to the expert on a discussion group), the expert’s personal website, or even a website other than his or her own. Searching for an expert using a search engine is a way to capture any of these extra nuggets of "public" information. To search for a known expert, simply type the name into a search engine such as <www.Google.com>. If you are looking for an expert in a particular specialty, type that specialty into Google and connect it with the word "expert" or the phrase "expert witness."

Has the expert been posting in Usenet discussion groups?
Besides searching the Google search engine to learn an expert’s opinion on a particular topic, you can also search postings made by the expert in a Usenet discussion group. These postings are searchable in Google Groups <http://groups.google.com>, a feature that is separate from Google’s general-purpose search engine. It contains over 750 million posts dating back to 1985. Search by the expert’s name or email address in the "author is" field on the advance search page.

The expert’s website – goldmine vs. landmine
An expert’s own website should be carefully reviewed prior to retaining them. Keep in mind that opposing counsel can do this as well. Be aware that experts’ websites are sometimes little more than self-promotion, so research carefully. Is there anything embarrassing or contradictory on the site? Imagine how the jury would react if the pages of the expert’s website were displayed as exhibits at trial – because they very well could be.

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