Expert insights, legal technology trends, and best practices for working with expert witnesses
Category: Timing and Instruction of Expert Witnesses - Expert instruction timing is rarely a deliberate strategic decision; it defaults to whenever the case calendar creates room for it. This piece makes the case for earlier instruction, before the legal team's own theory hardens, and gets specific about what "early" should actually mean in practice, along with a cost-conscious way to structure it.
Category: Communication Between Experts, Decision-Makers and Counsel - Case teams keep solving the same expert evidence communication problems from scratch, under pressure, case after case. This piece offers five reusable clauses, covering joint conference independence, limited post-conference review, a designated point of contact, assumption documentation, and escalation for ambiguous requests, worth having on file before the next engagement begins.
A judge once wrote that she paid no attention to an expert's report — then ruled exactly as it argued. That irony captures what six experts across law, medicine, and science all learned the hard way: the real fight in litigation happens on the page, long before anyone takes the stand.
Category: Communication Between Experts, Decision-Makers and Counsel - Institutional rules address the big structural questions but rarely the day-to-day operational ones, and that silence gets filled by default habit rather than deliberate design. This piece is a practical how-to for experts and counsel to build their own short, agreed communication framework early in an engagement, closing gaps the formal rules never anticipated.
Category: Communication Between Experts, Decision-Makers and Counsel - Most expert witness protocols restate general principles, independence, objectivity, appropriate communication, without ever getting specific enough to guide an actual decision under pressure. This piece sets out what a genuinely usable protocol should cover, from mandate documentation to joint conference rules to enforcement, and why format matters as much as content.
Category: Communication Between Experts, Decision-Makers and Counsel - Good expert witness guidance exists almost everywhere, yet the same problems keep recurring in practice. This piece examines why, breaking the gap down into awareness, incentive, and enforcement failures, and looks at which interventions actually change behavior versus which ones just add another document to the pile.
Category: Communication Between Experts, Decision-Makers and Counsel - Traditional sequential testimony struggles with a specific kind of expert disagreement: genuine methodological deadlock, where two experts disagree on the analytical approach itself rather than the underlying facts. This piece explains how concurrent evidence sessions, or hot-tubbing, address that problem directly, and where the format's real limits lie.
Category: Communication Between Experts, Decision-Makers and Counsel - Nearly every experienced expert has felt the pull, at some point, to bypass the process and explain a critical technical point directly to the tribunal. This piece examines why that instinct almost always deserves respect but not action, and lays out the proper channels that achieve the same goal without sacrificing procedural fairness.
Category: Communication Between Experts, Decision-Makers and Counsel - Collaboration between opposing experts is usually treated as an unambiguous virtue, but not every concession made in a joint conference reflects genuine technical agreement. This piece draws the line between conceding a point because the analysis warrants it and conceding ground because disagreement starts to feel socially uncomfortable, and offers a practical test for telling the two apart in real time.
Category: Communication Between Experts, Decision-Makers and Counsel - Most joint expert conferences happen exactly once, near the end of a case, after both positions have already hardened. This piece questions that convention and lays out a structured, milestone-based alternative, along with the safeguards needed to make more frequent contact between opposing experts safe rather than risky.
