As an expert witness, could blemishes on your professional record such as disciplinary actions be raised by opposing counsel to discredit your testimony?
Yes. It’s just like your mother said when you were going to school and you were getting in trouble, and she said, “It’s all going to become part of your permanent record.” Well, it’s the same thing here. Any part of your permanent record is fair game for bringing up. So if you had discipline problems, if you were charged with a crime and convicted of a crime, I mean a serious crime, I’m not talking about a speeding ticket. If you were involved in moral turpitude, if you were involved in loss of a license, if you were involved in any fraudulent dealings or anything like that, the attorneys will locate it fairly easily now, and they can bring it up to cross examine you and try to discredit you.
Do you see that happen fairly often?
Yes. The attorneys are very adept at finding information about experts. Most of the experts are used to that, but if an expert, for example, has all kinds of problems, they won’t be an expert very long. They’ll be “knocked out of the box” and they’ll be disqualified, and once you’re disqualified as an expert in one case, there could be some carryover into the next case.
Is it important to be able to explain things not only in technical jargon, but in layman’s terms that a jury can understand?
Yes, in a jury trial the judge is not the one that makes the ultimate decision, it’s the jury. It’s twelve men and women, lay people, who usually are not lawyers, who are usually not experts. Now some juries are pretty savvy and intelligent, and just because a juror doesn’t have a high education doesn’t mean they’re not smart. The lawyers talk about the collective wisdom of the jury. Each person may bring their own experiences, but when you put twelve people together they’re pretty smart, and the expert has to distill the information that he spent ten or twenty years learning into a half an hour or an hour, and be able to explain it in a fashion that can be understood. If it can’t be understood by the jury, then the jury will get upset, they’ll think the expert is talking down to them or making fun of them, or just discredit him because he’s not articulate enough to explain it. So you have to be able to explain what the jury needs to know in a fashion that they can understand.
Do most expert witnesses prefer to work in their own local area, or expand their business by traveling throughout the country?
It would depend on the kind of expert you are. Some experts travel. Some experts confine themselves to a county. Some experts confine themselves to a region, some to a state, some to the Northeast, and some experts travel nationally. By and large I would say most experts confine themselves to their state, and maybe some surrounding or contiguous states. So they might, if they’re in Massachusetts for example, go to Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, or something in the New England area. If you’re a high-powered expert and you have expertise which is hard to get, some lawyers may bring you in across country at substantial expense because they want your kind of expertise.
Is there a lot of competition to be an expert witness in most fields?
It would depend on the field. Some fields have a tremendous amount of competition, for example with medical witnesses there’s a lot of competition. But that doesn’t mean that you still can’t do well, because there’s a lot of need for expertise. The question is not really how much competition there is. The question is how many experts are there for how much business. So if taking an example of, let’s say, a neurosurgeon, there may be 10,000 neurosurgeons, maybe 1,000 or 500 of them who testify, and if there’s thousands of cases there is plenty of business to go around. On the other hand there may only be 200 arborists, or tree experts, but there may only be 1,000 cases to go around, so it depends on the number of cases and the number of people that are trying to get that work.
Are there people who are full-time expert witnesses, or is this something that’s typically done part-time along with your primary career?
Most people start out part-time. They’re an engineer, they do their engineering work, they build bridges and so forth, and in their off hours or during certain parts of the day or parts of the week, they do some expert witness consulting and testimony. As experts generally get older, after they hit fifty or sixty, a lot of them tend to retire from their normal, regular professions, and then some of them go into expert witnessing full-time. So they may have been a civil engineer for thirty years, and now they’re 65 years old, they retire from being a civil engineer and going into the office every day, but they’re more or less a full-time expert.
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