Join us for a discussion with folks from the Expert Institute as part of our special sponsorship bonus track. Learn about cutting edge services EI has developed to help trial lawyers track information about their own and opposing experts.
Join us for a discussion with folks from the Expert Institute as part of our special sponsorship bonus track. Learn about cutting edge services EI has developed to help trial lawyers track information about their own and opposing experts.
Speaker 1 (0s): This is the elevate podcast where trial lawyers learn, share, and grow. Let's talk about how we can elevate our trial practices, law firms, and lives. And now here are your hosts coming to you from coast to coast trial lawyers, Ben Gideon, and Rahul Ravipudi
Speaker 2 (33s): Today's episode of the elevate podcast is brought to you by the expert Institute, check out expert institutes, new cutting edge feature expert radar, where they track down background information about your own expert or the opposing expert, including their litigation activity. Any times they've been challenged, speeches, articles, presentations, deposition, transcripts, you name it, just push the button and let them go to work, tracking down all that information for you, saves you time.
And when they find information that is helpful to you, it can be a game changer for your case. Check them out@expertinstitute.com. Today's episode is also brought to you by hype legal hype. Legal is a digital marketing web development firm specializing in helping the high end of the trial practice develop great websites, great digital marketing campaigns. Give them a call. Talk to Tyler Mica over there.
See what they can do for you. Finally today's episode is brought to you by smart advocate. Smart advocate is award winning case management software used by trial lawyers all over the country to help manage the docket of cases that you have in your practice allows you to do everything from templates to forms to work plans saves time, makes your practice more profitable and efficient. Check them out@smartadvocate.com.
So welcome to a special bonus episode of the elevate podcast. We're really excited today to talk to our friends at the expert Institute, as our listeners know you, you guys have been great sponsors of our show from the outset, which we really appreciate. You have got a great company providing some really essential services to people who do what we do for a living. So we want to really mostly hear from you today about your business and what some of the new cutting edge stuff you're offering trial lawyers. So we have with us, Michael Morgan stern, senior vice president for marketing at expert Institute, Neil Nemeroff is the senior vice president of content and data strategy and John Daimler, senior vice president, and head of product and technology.
So first, can you just guys tell us for those listeners who may have been living in a cave and don't know who the expert Institute is or what you do, just give us kind of a brief thumbnail sketch of what your company does.
Speaker 3 (3m 10s): We've been in business since about 2010. We work primarily with plaintiff attorneys, but we do work across all practice areas. And our core service would be providing experts, search and vetting across all specialties in any geography, but primarily across north America. And the business has primarily been a professional services business, but over the years, listening to the market, being in this industry for such a long time, the business has evolved in a number of ways.
And we have consulting services primarily on medical malpractice cases. We have a team of about 50 physicians on staff that can provide consulting services to attorneys that are looking to validate cases for merit and what John and Neil are going to speak a moron is that we are now getting more involved in developing software and providing data and content to trial attorneys primarily about expert witnesses. So let John and Neil get into more details.
Cause it's, it's really exciting and we can't wait to share with the market.
Speaker 2 (4m 16s): Yeah. And I understand you have a new product called expert radar. Is that what you're referring to? And it, can you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 4 (4m 24s): Yes, I can step in then. So we've taken that 10 year history of operating primarily around expert search and referral and being experts on experts, understanding all the information that it requires to do that successfully. And there's an accumulation of content that that's gone on and we've recognized we could be using it in different ways and packaging it in different ways. And that's much of the backstory to what is now radar. We cleaned up that database of experts.
We extended it and acquire third-party content sets to integrate to it and built a content management infrastructure that allows us to very efficiently process that information and serve it up to our clients through expert IQ in a very, you know, kind of cutting edge format relative to what they might be used to elsewhere in terms of, you know, having a profile of an expert witness or a really understanding of a background in depth.
And what I mean by that is, you know, the delivery through an a web based application allows that information to be much more in depth. It also allows it to be structured in a way that allows us to update it and push updates in real time and alert you if something changes on an expert's profile and it allows the user to comb through the information at a much more efficient manner. So we provide search on top of profiles. We will provide an ability to bookmark and cut up, highlight within the application to share findings and communicate around different facets, the expert that you might want to highlight to a colleague.
And we're seeing a lot of strong reception to that approach, just, you know, a much more different, much more collaborative approach to diligencing and expert at understanding all the, all the different bits of information that can help you evaluate where to, where to take questioning or how to just approach individual.
Speaker 2 (6m 25s): So it's this, if you have opposing experts, you're trying to get opposition research on them, is that where that comes into play? And can you give us some examples of the kind of different types of data that that might provide to, to counsel to help, you know, examine the opposing experts?
Speaker 5 (6m 46s): Sure. Ben, our radars are available on your own witnesses, opposition witnesses, and even defendants. And that's because it's so in-depth, and it makes a lot of sense, given that most trial attorneys are going to be reviewing this content anyway and looking for this type of information on those experts or defendants. The depth of the profiles that we create are really rich as John was saying from the professional side, we'll cover their education licenses, certifications, publications, awards, grants, conferences, and on, we also cover their risk and credibility.
So we do background checks, look at any kind of news articles associated with them, disciplinary actions, malpractice, social media. And then one of the parts that our clients have really embraced and value considerably is the litigation activity. So regardless of if that expert was being challenged or not any time they're an expert witness, or anytime they're a defendant, we go into a deep dive into those cases that they're involved with and create just this actionable intelligence.
So the trial lawyer knows this is where I need to go with this witness during a deposition or during a trial. I have a lot of information and experience based on the litigation activity, seeing how this witness has reacted and what their responses have been. And it, it just seems to really resonate with our core clients substantially
Speaker 2 (8m 31s): By litigation activity. Are you primarily talking about prior testimony at deposition or trial or
Speaker 5 (8m 37s): Yeah. Anytime they've been involved in a case yeah. As a part of the proceedings, sometimes you get an indication without a deposition as to how that expert is, what that expert's actually going to say. So those are recorded in the different documents that we collect from the docket. And so yeah, that information isn't included in there plus anything that they said during a deposition or in a trial, and we categorize that and present it in a way that really matches the workflow of how an attorney and the attorney's team moves forward with the case.
Speaker 4 (9m 17s): And in some cases, you know, much to Neil's chagrin at times, there will be hundreds of litigation activities that exist against a particular expert, whether those are actual expert witness testimony or personal litigation that they've involved with. And the amount of time we save for attorneys that would otherwise attempt to gather that on their own and then put it in some system or print it and then efficiently work through it. We feel like there's tremendous value that we're providing doing that on their behalf and giving them a tool to work through that information smoothly and really in a collaborative fashion, if you want to, if you want to approach it that way across the team,
Speaker 2 (9m 57s): There are some other ways to obtain that type of information. What I, what I'm familiar with is through the Lexus database or Westlaw or trial Smith, how does what you guys do differ from what might be available through some of those other sources? If you're familiar with them
Speaker 5 (10m 17s): For one, it's a lot of effort to go to all of those different sources to get a complete picture. And that's what you'd have to do. Not one of them offers a complete picture. And so part of the value of what we do is we're going to all different services, all different applications have deep relationships with third parties where we're acquiring this data. We have our own very large research team that are going out and getting this on our own.
And so it becomes not only a factor of having a complete picture by taking all of the services that may be out there that a firm may use, but it also is an ROI issue. It's going to cost an attorney many, many times what it cost us to do it because we have such a process in place that we can allow that we can leverage across all different all of our firms.
And every time we deliver a radar,
Speaker 2 (11m 21s): Yeah. I mean, I will say, wait, I took advantage of that service myself in a recent case with an expert who had quite a litigation history and you guys pulled together quite massive volume of, of materials, depositions, and lots of stuff. And you know, when you do this for a living, getting that wide net of materials so helpful, because sometimes it can just be one thing that makes all the difference, but you don't know what the one thing is until you've seen it. All right. So I did find that helpful.
And yes, it does take, if I assign my staff, the responsibility of gathering all the expert materials that is hours and hours of staff time to do that. So I see the value in that.
Speaker 4 (12m 6s): And one other points come back to on that in a lot of cases with folks we compete with in this space, it's a one-time exercise to go cat at that of probation. And what we want to make sure comes through to our clients and users is that once you enable radar on an individual, it's an ongoing monitoring process that occurs. So a new publications come, come online, do your presentations that have gone up on YouTube, anything, new litigation activity. We alert you when that change occurs and give you an opportunity to jump in and check out what's changed.
So really valuable part of that service and just, you know, very dynamic versus static approach to delivering this type of information
Speaker 2 (12m 52s): We'd like to thank the sponsors of the elevate podcast. Steno steno is a court reporting service offering court reporting all over the United States. The great feature of steno among others is that they offer the ability to defer payment for court reporting services until the end of your case, which means you can enhance your cashflow as a plaintiff's lawyer, since you're not getting paid until the case resolves, allowing you to the freedom to take as many depositions as you want, and you need in order to prove your case, shut them out@steno.com.
We're also sponsored today by law pods law pods is a service that helps lawyers create podcasts. Like the very podcast you're listening to right now, LA pods is our producer, all of the great content and production quality for the show, which is terrific is done by law pods. If you have an idea for a podcast or just want to run something by them, check them out@lapods.com, give them a call and see what they can do to help you.
Speaker 5 (14m 3s): The static approach is pretty important because when you're looking at a presentation, yeah, so we let you know that this expert is involved in a presentation, but then we take a deeper and allow you through the platform expert IQ. We allow you then to go deeper into that presentation and see, potentially see the actual presentation that the expert gave, or at the very least look at the topics that were involved in that presentation and why it may be pertinent to your case.
Speaker 2 (14m 34s): I don't want you to disclose any trade secrets, but that that's one thing that I've always found can be incredibly valuable, but it's hard to get our experts, speeches, and presentations, lectures, you know, experts speaking at the defense research Institute on how to kill the plaintiff's case. You know, you'd kinda like to get the PowerPoints and syllabus for that, but it's, it's really hard to get. How do you guys,
Speaker 5 (14m 60s): I get it every time. We're not going to get it every time for sure. But, you know, we aggressively go after getting the details on the presentations, on the publications, on the conferences, on the research that they've been involved in, if it's a medical professional specifically. So, yeah.
Speaker 2 (15m 17s): And how do you guys do that? Or are you just doing actual legwork with people that are kind of reaching out and trying to get individual items or is there some kind of third-party collection of this data that you can tap into? And again, I don't want you to tell us your trade secrets, but I'm just interests me.
Speaker 5 (15m 38s): There's no trade secret. It's really kind of part of our process. You know, certainly third-party relationships that we have that we're allowed to scale that were enabled to scale across our, all of our clients. That's certainly part of it. We use a lot of tools that allow us to search the web in a efficient way and obtain this information if it's there. But because of our very large research team that we now have, we're able to make calls and get information where we believe it is, is available.
And it is often times a, you know, a hunt we're scavengers in a way, but it's better that we're the scavengers looking for this information. Then you guys spending a lot of time doing it yourselves. And like I said, we're not always able to get that detailed information that is that kind of golden nugget that you as an attorney are looking for, but we certainly do the legwork to get it and make it available to you.
Speaker 4 (16m 46s): And,
Speaker 5 (16m 48s): Oh, that's a great segue. Yeah, for sure. For sure. So anytime we're able to get the deposition from our clients from the docket itself, many depositions and trial transcripts are available on the docket. We aggressively go after it. And as a part of the feedback that we've received from our clients, we're actually introducing our transcript network. I believe it's going to be released in the next couple of weeks, which really takes advantage of this huge community of clients that we have that are so willing to give us their depositions so that it can be shared throughout the ecosystem of our clients and throughout expert IQ.
So we're really excited about that because we feel that we're uniquely positioned to not only get quantity in terms of the number of transcripts that our clients want. But as John alluded to earlier, that it's going to really, we're going to turn a nod into not just documents, but turn it into content through our expert IQ platform. So clients will be able to search in a myriad of different ways to find the right deposition, to identify the salient points of that deposition that may be germane to the case and even redact certain parts that they don't want other attorneys to see.
They can easily redact it, ideally at a bare minimum. The pository enables. Now a lot of our attorneys who may have cabinet depositions or may have different lawyers having depositions and transcripts, where they don't have access to at the very least, we're giving them access to a mechanism that they can have all of their depositions in one place, manage their own depositions. As they see fit, even making them private, if they choose.
And it becomes a great tool for them and to stay on of course, expert IQ, but also to enable them to manage search and get the greatest benefit out of their own repository of transcripts.
Speaker 2 (19m 5s): I was told, I was supposed to ask you about insurance claims data, but you don't want to get into too much detail about that at this time. So what can you tell us about insurance claims data?
Speaker 5 (19m 18s): Well, essentially we've released the ability for our clients to see is an expert really clinically active, right based on Medicare claims and other types of sources. We're able to give them an indication that you may say that you're expert, but you've never done this procedure. You may say you're an expert in this particular case, but you, you rarely ever do this procedure.
Speaker 2 (19m 46s): You're saying that there's data out there. If we've got a general surgeon and it's a laparoscopic colosectomy case, there's data on how many times insurance companies have been asked to reimburse for that doctor performing that procedure that you can look at to tell us whether they actually do that or not. Is that what you're exactly?
Speaker 5 (20m 6s): Yeah,
Speaker 2 (20m 6s): That's pretty cool. I like that
Speaker 4 (20m 9s): There is data and, you know, it's very directional in nature, but there's information and there's, we're, we're seeing a lot of clients find a ton of value and just having a, a glimpse at that and using it to develop some questioning. And
Speaker 2 (20m 23s): What kind of format do we get that data? And is it like summary of the number of procedures or what is it an Excel spreadsheet? What what's actually coming our way on that
Speaker 4 (20m 37s): It's delivered alongside the, the radar profile. So it's delivered in expert IQ. And if you can imagine some summary information, just high-level procedure volume, diagnosis volume, relative to peers that we define as well as a very detailed claim level code level descriptions. So we see a lot of people coming in and punching in a specific procedure like you described and quickly getting a sense of an activity level around that.
Speaker 2 (21m 5s): That's interesting. Tell us about litigation analytics,
Speaker 4 (21m 10s): Litigation analytics was that main kind of hard of the profile that Neil described, where we go out and we inventory all the, all the case history for a particular expert. The initial rollout of that was really just kind of a series of tables and grids that listed the specific case involvement. But we did some work to really kind of celebrate that content, put a, you know, a nice experience on top of it in many cases where you have hundreds of litigation activities. So we've made some clickable charts and just summary information. So you can quickly get a sense, is this expert predominantly affiliated with defense versus plaintiff?
You know, what's, we have a chart that demonstrates their activity over time. So was there is their activity level increasing maybe at the expense of active practice in their profession, or was there a big spike of activity, you know, in the early two thousands? What was that about? So it's just a great way to give you a quick snapshot of, of what the detailed level engagement activity might be suggesting to you without necessarily having to go through and build that picture yourself.
And we have a lot of plans to keep enhancing that and to fill up in different, you know, measures or analytics that you can, you can imagine for expert witness activity. So a lot of what we've done there, and in my opinion, really just kind of scratches the surface of what we could do there.
Speaker 5 (22m 33s): And I see it as a bit of a scorecard, if you, oh, you know, like we're able, even from those charts, you're able to see how often are they challenged and what grounds are they challenged on? You know, so you get an idea of is this expert, you know, is there a higher chance that they're going to be challenged in how I should challenge them, but, and a lot of attorneys tell me that, you know, if I see an expert that is only working for the defense, that in itself, by seeing the level or the percentage of their work that is just done for the plaintiff or just done for defense then itself kind of gives them insight as to a way to maybe attack an opposition witness.
For example,
Speaker 2 (23m 15s): What's the craziest thing you've found any expert without getting too specific to the case, but,
Speaker 5 (23m 24s): Well, I'll tell you one that just happened last week in terms of a radar that we've done is that there's an expert, or I think there are a defendant as well, but a doctor where they've been charged with manslaughter. And that's not the case though. We have the cases and about them, but it's about this particular doctor who going to be an expert witness, but, but charged with manslaughter, that's pretty radical.
Speaker 2 (23m 55s): It's a nice fact to know probably well guys, we really appreciate your coming on and describing the service. If, if our listeners are interested in either the expert Institute or in general, or the specific new expert radar service that we've discussed today, how do they go about finding you guys and signing up for that?
Speaker 3 (24m 19s): They could simply visit expert institute.com and the kid find a link to expert radar easily in our top navigation. They Google expert radar where the number one result. And I just want to add some more color here, like Neil and John had been describing. There's just such a deep, rich amount of data, as you can imagine on, on experts through their litigation experience, social media activity, insurance claims data, and all of it is packaged up in such a beautiful piece of software that is called expert IQ.
And it just makes navigating through all of this information, super easy for the user. And we're really excited for, for people to come check it out.
Speaker 2 (25m 0s): Well, I appreciate it. It's a great service that saves us a lot of time. And in the right case, it can really be a game changer and it helps our clients tremendously to have that. So thank you.
Speaker 6 (25m 11s): Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate the collaboration and appreciate your support for the podcast.
Speaker 3 (25m 17s): Thanks everybody. Appreciate
Speaker 5 (25m 18s): It. Thank you for your time guys. Thank you guys.
Speaker 1 (25m 21s): For more information about today's guests and the topics discussed on the show, please visit our website@wwwdotelevate.net. That's E L a w B a T e.net where you'll find guest profiles and show notes, and you can continue the conversation by joining our Facebook group. And if you enjoy today's show, we hope that you'll subscribe and consider giving us a five-star review. So for now, keep on working to elevate your trial practice, and we'll see you back again soon.