Whether from a law firm or an expert witness consultancy, attorneys preparing for trial tend to lean on trusted networks to find them an appropriate expert witness for trial. But two emerging startups are hoping to force the expert witness system beyond the traditional confines of the referral.
Expert Witness Exchange, the brainchild of personal injury trial attorney Paul Levin, is developing an online marketplace paired with a large-scale legal analytics platform to help attorneys find their best-fit expert witness. The other, JuriLytics, is a recent graduate of LexisNexis' new legal technology accelerator program, and is looking to leverage scientific peer review to give attorneys the upper hand in taking down an opposing expert witness.
Neither service is fully operational yet JuriLytics will launch officially this week, while Expert Witness Exchange is set to launch later this year but both are looking to harness technology to "disrupt" current expert witness strategy in very different ways.
Expert Witness Exchange was initially designed as a kind of expert witness directory, but pivoted slightly to launch the service as a searchable marketplace operating alongside a machine-learning-driven analytics platform, Cosmos Legal, which allows users to review years' worth of data about the success and challenges a particular expert witness or issue has faced in court. The startup will also demarcate some users with a "Validation Badge," meaning that they've been vetted and approved by the startup's Validation Committee.
Expert Witness Exchange CEO Melinda Black comes from a traditional expert witness consultancy background. She said that while she doesn't imagine that services like Expert Witness Exchange will uproot expert witness consulting altogether, it can certainly open some doors for attorneys who've found consultants too limiting or costly for their work.
"[A consulting group] takes the work out of the hands of the attorney, but it also perhaps limits the number of experts they can actually look at, whereas we have hundreds of thousands of experts, and they can potentially look side by side at any number of them," she explained.
Black imagines that the service will be of use for both retaining and vetting expert witnesses as well as researching expert witnesses hired by opposing counsel.
JuriLytics uses a very different kind of data set to bring expert witness insight to the table. The platform uses a proprietary algorithm to search through a massive database of scientific abstracts to find well-cited, well-regarded experts in a field who can then "peer review" expert reports. The Mississippi Supreme Court recently issued a decision citing a JuriLytics peer review as a basis to exclude a causation expert witness.