Education & Training
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Articles & Papers: Click to Pick Cold Case Toolkit: Click to Pick Hot Topics + Click to Pick Bibliographies Guest Lecture Series: Click to Pick Law 101: Legal Guide for the Forensic Expert |
Digging Up Dirt on ExpertsInformation from the presentation by Carol Henderson
Expert Witness DirectoriesOnline expert witness directories allow a researcher to find specialists with specific expertise. Most are free to the end user. Experts pay a fee to list their information. Many bar associations now include online expert witness directories. Experts.com (www.experts.com/directory.asp) FindLaw (http://marketcenter.findlaw.com/scripts/browse/4/415/417) ALMExperts.com (www.almexperts.com/ExpertWitness) HG.org (www.hgexperts.com/hg/consultants_expert_witnesses.asp) Rominger Legal (www.romingerlegal.com/expert/allcategories.html) JurisPro Expert Witness Directory (www.jurispro.com/expertList.asp) ExpertPages (http://expertpages.com) The Internet Directory of Expert Witnesses (www.ExpertWitness.com) Internet Legal Resource Guide: Expert Testimony & Consultant Resources (www.ilrg.com/experts_ref.html) The National Directory of Expert Witnesses (www.national-experts.com) Also see Jim Robinson, Finding and Researching Expert Witnesses on the Web, LLRX.com, October 1, 2002 (http://www.llrx.com/features/findingexperts.htm). General Internet Research ToolsGoogle (http://www.google.com) Lycos (http://www.lycos.com) AltaVista (http://www.AltaVista.com) Excite (http://www.excite.com) LawCrawler (http://lawcrawler.findlaw.com) Searches legal information Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com) searches Google, Yahoo!, AskJeeves, and Overture. ‘Meta-search engines’ scan other major search engines and then list the top results based on statistical findings. Search Engine Comparison Chart (http://www.llrx.com/features/searchenginechart.htm) Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) ‘Human-powered’ directories depend on an editorial review of listings The Invisible Web Search engine experts estimate that the most popular search engines fail to index (locate) 70-75 percent of Internet pages. Inquisitive researchers need to look at other sites to find information besides search engines. See Marcus P. Zillman, Deep Web Research 2005, LLRX.com, January 17, 2005 (http://www.llrx.com/features/deepweb2005.htm). Scientific Associations & SocietiesAssociations Unlimited Database, commonly called the Encyclopedia of Associations, contains detailed descriptions of 135,000 membership organizations in all fields. This database is available online through many university library sites and can also be accessed through many public libraries with a valid library card number. It is also available on Westlaw. UniversitiesUniversity sites will often include articles, presentations, dissertations, and theses written by professors and students. This information may be removed from the visible site but is still accessible by searching the site itself. An inquisitive researcher can also find a specific faculty member's curriculum vitae that would not be found on a search engine. The ‘advanced search’ function on Google (www.google.com/advanced_search) can restrict a search to the contents of specific university sites. A centralized list of colleges and universities with links to their home pages has been established on the University of Florida site. (www.clas.ufl.edu/au). Educational credentials can be verified for a fee at Credentials, Inc. (http://www.degreechk.com) and National Student Clearinghouse (http://www.studentclearinghouse.org). Government ContractorsExcluded Parties List System (http://www.epls.gov) lists individuals and entities that are excluded from receiving contracts or financial assistance from the federal government. Doctors & Healthcare FacilitiesThe Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations site (http://www.qualitycheck.org/consumer/searchQCR.aspx) contains a directory of HMOs, hospitals, medical laboratories, behavioral healthcare facilities (chemical dependency centers and developmental disability facilities), assisted living facilities, and office-based surgeons. Pending & Litigated LawsuitsTo determine if an expert is a party in a lawsuit, try the following sites: U.S. Party/Case Index (http://pacer.uspci.uscourts.gov) federal courts, updated daily, fee based; Justia’s Federal District Court Filings & Dockets (http://dockets.justia.com) federal cases, free search; and Who’s Suing Whom (http://www.tlc-com/texis/tmp/litcases3) patent, trademark or copyright cases, fee based. Deposition TranscriptsExperts often do not realize that their prior testimony may be available for review by the opposing party in a future case. This can be useful for impeachment purposes and to track trends, such as an expert's tendency to testify for a certain law firm. Atkinson Baker Court Reporters (www.depo.com) has over 100,000 deposition transcripts archived. The service will not search for past testimony from specific experts, but it will provide archived transcripts if the case is known by the researcher. The Defense Research Institute (www.dri.org), a membership association concerned with the defense of civil actions, provides archived depositions for its members. The Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA) (www.atla.org) provides more than 22,000 archived depositions. An information-sharing network of defense firms, corporations, and government entities called Idex (www.idex.com) allows defense attorneys to access deposition transcripts. The Idex site contains a database of over 800,000 records of expert involvement and full text copies of an expert's testimony. Fee based. Plaintiff attorneys have created TRIALSmith (www.depoconnect.com), which contains 175,000 deposition transcripts. Partner associations include 48 state trial organizations (all states and the District of Columbia, except Illinois, North Dakota, and South Dakota). Briefs, pleadings, verdicts, settlements, and other information are also available on the site. Generally, a fee-based subscription is required. Medical Malpractice Expert Witness Depositions and Testimony Database (www.malpracticedepositions.com) Published Works/PeriodicalsThough curricula vitae can be located on the Internet, frequently experts will omit some published works. There are, however, a variety of sources where an inquisitive researcher can go to find sources where the expert has been published or quoted. Westlaw (www.westlaw.com) or LexisNexis (www.lexis.com) are the most comprehensive sources for published works. Both services require memberships and rates vary depending on the type of access plan the user secures. FindArticles.com (www.findarticles.com) Has a searchable database of more than 5 million articles from approximately 500 print periodicals with coverage back to 1998. Some of articles are included on Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com), and therefore are indexed on general search engines. MagPortal.com (www.magportal.com) Searches approximately 150 online magazines and newsletters. Not all articles from each of the listed periodicals are necessarily indexed. Only those articles that are freely available online are included. PubMed (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi) A service of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the site includes over 15 million citations for biomedical articles dating back to the 1950s. Citations include links to sites that include full-text articles and come from MEDLINE as well as assorted life science journals. Social Science Research Network (http://www.ssrn.com) disseminates social science research and encourages early distribution of research results. IngentaConnect (www.ingentaconnect.com) Contains a collection of academic and professional publications with over 18 million articles, chapters, and reports. Site searches more than 29,000 publications. ISI Highly Cited (http://www.isihighlycited.com) provides biographical profiles of the research professionals who are among the most cited individuals from 1989 forward across 21 subject areas. To find a comprehensive list of books authored by an expert a researcher should visit the online catalog of the Library of Congress (http://catalog.loc.gov) or Amazon.com (www.amazon.com). Newspapers Newspapers frequently seek comments from specialists about topical issues, comments which can later be used by a resourceful opposing party. A newspaper that has published a quote by an expert often has used the expert in the past. A diligent researcher can refer to the newspaper and utilize its search function to find earlier published quotes or other relevant information about an expert. Google News (http://news.google.com) has a searchable database of 4,500 news sources. Newslink (http://newslink.org) The site has links to major newspapers, radio and television stations, and selected magazines. It also links to a limited number of international newspapers. ThePaperboy.com (www.thepaperboy.com) Based in Australia, the site links to both domestic and international newspapers, including small regional papers. A searchable index allows a user to find newspapers within a specific geographic region. Listserv Lists, Bulletin Boards, Blogs & MoreMany experts share information and theories on Internet bulletin boards and mailing lists (frequently called ‘listservs’). These sources may not be found utilizing standard search engines yet they could contain information that the opposing party in a case can locate. Communications between experts and attorneys are available for free viewing on such boards. Legal organizations and sites such as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA) (www.atlanet.org/Lyris/index.aspx) and FindLaw (http://boards.lp.findlaw.com) offer list servers for lawyers. Other listservs, such as EXPERT-L, a board maintained by the Expert Witness Network (http://www.witness.net/html/list.htm), are directed to both experts and the legal community. Google (www.google.com) recently acquired the Deja News Usenet archive, a collection of public discussion newsgroups. A researcher can search for relevant Usenet groups at http://groups-beta.google.com. The researcher can conduct a search for the expert as a message author (i.e., author:firstname, author:lastname, or author:emailaddress@domain.com). FORENS-L is an electronic discussion group initially designed for forensic scientists that has members in the legal, academic, and scientific communities. Subscribing is free and can be done by sending a mail message to postmaster@acc.fau.edu. The subject line is left blank and the text of the message should read: subscribe forens-l [your name]. If an expert maintains a blog, any posted comments might be useful to determine whether the expert has ever taken a different view on a subject. Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com) searches blogs by subject. Clusty (http://blogs.clusty.com) is a metasearch tool that scans other blog search engines and delivers the results in an organized hierarchy. Experts might post their curricula vitae, resumes or profiles on networking websites such as Linkedin (http://www.linkedin.com). Other networking resources for posting business profiles include Ziggs (http://www.ziggs.com), Ryze (http://www.ryze.com), and the popular personal profiling websites MySpace (http://www.myspace.com) and Facebook (http://www.facebook.com). As more and more podcasts are produced, they should not be overlooked as a resource for determining an expert’s opinion or change of opinion. Podzinger (http://www.everyzing.com) searches the spoken text of an entire podcast, not just the text of the podcast’s title or author. Jury VerdictsThe National Association of State Jury Verdict Publishers includes a free directory of more than 25,000 experts who have testified in civil jury trial across the United States in the last five years, found at http://www.juryverdicts.com/experts/index.html. The NASJVP publishes state-specific civil jury verdict case summaries in weekly and monthly newsletters. The summaries highlight the case name/number, venue, judge, trial attorneys, expert witnesses, and include a paragraph outlining the factual and legal allegations. Public RecordsIn addition to subscriber services such as Westlaw and Lexis, the following resources compile a variety of information available from public records (generally, for a fee) or provide links to public records:
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