Launching Your Expert Witness Career: Seven Insightful Stories

By Noah Bolmer

The paths to becoming an expert witness are as varied as the experts themselves. In this second part to our series on getting started, guests on our podcast Engaging Experts share their own “first time” stories.  

For some experts, their start is serendipitous. Cosmetology expert Laura DuPriest recalls:  

I initially got involved because I was doing the hair of a client who happened to be an attorney, and he knew I was a makeup artist. This was in my salon in downtown Sacramento at the Hyatt Regency where we saw a lot of businesspeople. He said, ‘Laura, I need to ask you a question about how makeup can cover bruises.’ I thought that was an odd question from a male. I said, ‘Sure, regarding what?’ He explained that he had a case where there was a domestic violence situation. He was defending one of the parties who claimed that the other party had falsified physical abuse, and they believed this was done with makeup or makeup creation [ . . .] I agreed to look at it and he had me testify in court just as a makeup artist, not as an expert. Then a few years later, in 2005, I got a phone call from a law firm in Oregon who wanted to know if I could look at a file and be their expert. I didn’t understand at that time what “expert” meant in the legal world. In my world, it was someone who was good at something. I agreed to look at the file and I gave him my opinion in a phone call. Well, then, what came next was, “Can you write a report?” I said, “Okay.” I had to contact some friends who were attorneys to find out what you do when you write a report. My engagement initially was from a novice point-of-view, and it took one case a year—requested by attorneys from California mostly—until finally it got to be an understanding with myself that this was something that many people do in different fields. It started as a trickle. 

Others, like medical expert Dr. Stephen Cohen, begin as court-ordered experts, and find they enjoy it:  

When I was a third-year surgery resident at Boston University working in the emergency room, I got asked—well, actually, I was subpoenaed—to come to court to testify and explain that what I saw from a gunshot wound in the head was brain matter. I thought that was cool because medicine and law are two different worlds completely. When I finished my training and started practice in Atlanta in 1994, my senior partner said, ‘By the way, are you interested in reviewing a case because I’m too busy?’ I didn’t know what that meant but I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘You get paid for it.’ Okay. That’s really how it started. […] What I do now is very similar to my doctor’s hat. Not only am I taking care of patients (and currently taking care of veterans), but teaching, training, and educating medical students and residents. A well-rounded, successful, and competent expert witness has to be able to teach medicine to juries, attorneys, and courts because none of those groups know medicine. I don’t know the law, for sure, but nobody else knows medicine other than those doing it on a day-to-day basis. 

For mechanical engineering expert David Smith, it’s a family affair: 

For me, it came naturally with the job that I was in. I’m a third-generation engineer. My grandpa started a consulting company back in the late 70s, before I was born. My dad worked with [my grandpa] up until he retired in 2000. Then, my dad started Alpine Engineering and Design and I’ve been working with him since about 2006. As part of that, we started out only doing design work in heavy equipment—garbage trucks, area lifts, dump trucks, trailers, scissor lifts—and because we had developed such an expertise in those areas, attorneys started to come. First, they asked my grandpa if he would be an expert witness, and he did it once and said, ‘This is not for me. I do not like this type of work.’ He was done and out, but my dad watched that, and he started to pursue that because he liked that type of work. He started doing more of that, and as I came on, I got to work with him in an associate type of role. I would do research for him. I would do testing for him. I would help draft his reports, and eventually it got to the point where I was doing my own cases. 

Economic damages and Internet expert Sameer Somal had a law firm client who first asked him to work as an expert:  

It’s that Dr. Benjamin Franklin, aphorism, Noah, “diligence is the mother of good luck.” We founded Blue Ocean Global Technology, did a lot of work for PR firms doing technical work, and collaborated on campaigns. They referred us to law firms and [The American Lawyer] top firm Nixon Peabody approached me one day and said, ‘Sameer, we’ve interviewed four experts. You’re the fifth and we want you to be an expert witness in this case.’ And I said, ‘What is an expert witness and why would I want to do that?’ The folks at Nixon Peabody said, ‘You’re the perfect expert witness because you’re not what we call a professional expert witness. You run a company that has served hundreds of clients. You’ve worked with our law firm on sensitive situations and advised our team so we know you can provide value. You understand the nuances of digital advertising, online reputation management, technology development, and speak at events all over the world. You author CLE programs, and we know you’d be good in front of a judge and a jury. Why don’t you give it a shot?’ And that was the point of no return. That seems like a lifetime ago. 

Economics expert Dr. Charles Parekh got his start right out of out of school:  

It’s a funny story. I didn’t know [expert witnessing] was a job, but I was graduating from school in the middle of the tech boom where you got jobs thrown at you. A professor of mine that I liked who was an economist at the University of Chicago (where I did a master’s degree) said, ‘I work for a consulting firm. Do you want to come join?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ I showed up on day one and I said, ‘What do we do?’ It turns out they did expert testimony work for the US Postal Service, and every time the postal service wanted to raise their rates, they had to justify it in front of the Postal Rate Commission [now known as Postal Regulatory Commission]. We were the testifying experts on behalf of the US Postal Service. It was an ongoing annual contract. I decided that while I liked expert testimony work, I didn’t necessarily want to pigeonhole myself into postal work—although I did for years. That’s how I discovered expert testimony work, and I’ve been in the industry ever since. 

A former student pulled legal expert Professor Gregory Ogden into a case:  

My first case involving expert witnessing was in the early 1990s. It was at the same time as the O.J. Simpson criminal trial, where Mr. Simpson was charged with murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. It was also in the era when cable TV became prominent. Many of my colleagues, who had expertise in criminal law, were cable commentators on the Simpson trial, along with professors. I didn’t become one of those commentators, but I got involved in a case brought by a former student at Pepperdine. I didn’t have this person as a student when I was a professor, but he represented a client suing a law firm. There were legal ethics issues with the duties lawyers owe to former clients under the conflict-of-interest rules governing lawyers in California. That was my first case as an expert witness. My deposition was taken, and the day after I gave my trial testimony, as we were leaving the courtroom, we heard cheering from behind the closed doors of the LA county courthouse. We discovered that the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case had come down, and we left downtown quickly. That was a memorable case because I had never done expert witness work. 

Lastly, IP expert Stephen Pope found that publishing brought in unexpected requests:  

Completely by accident. It turns out that in the late 80s and early 90s, I was working at [the] Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and at Stanford and published several things later in the late 90s and early 2000s. It seemed like every year I got a call from some attorney saying, ‘Are you the guy who published that paper?’ I said, ‘Yeah, why?’ and they said, ‘It turns out that somebody else patented that’ or ‘Your paper would be useful to use as prior art.’ I got started doing IP work because I published things that at the time I published, I didn’t know what to call it. Later, it was called the World Wide Web, or object-oriented operating systems, or surround-sound in headphones. A bunch of things that became big things. About the third time this happened, I grudgingly said, ‘I better learn how to do this.’  

We continue to collect and feature stories highlighting the many routes to becoming experts—often not so much a path chosen as one stumbled upon and enjoyed. 

Interested in your own first expert witness story? Consider signing up with Round Table Group! For over 30 years, we have been helping litigators locate, evaluate, and employ only the most qualified expert witnesses. Contact us at 202-759-3054 for more information or sign up now!