Expert Witness Services Compared
There are three ways to find an expert witness, and they solve different problems. Understanding which model fits your case saves both money and the two weeks you would otherwise spend calling people who never call back.
The three models
Directories sell listings. Experts pay to appear, and firms pay for access to search the database. SEAK and TASA are the best known. You get a large searchable pool and you do all the outreach, screening, and conflict checking yourself.
Sourcing and referral firms do the work for you. You describe the case, they identify candidates, contact them, screen them, and deliver a short list. Expert Institute and Blackstorm both operate this way, along with several regional firms.
Direct sourcing means finding the expert yourself through academic institutions, professional associations, and personal networks. It costs nothing but your time, and on a case with a common specialty it is often the right answer. You can also browse our expert witness specialties to see the disciplines we cover most often.
Directories
The strength of a directory is breadth and immediacy. You can search across thousands of listings at two in the morning and get names instantly.
The limitation is that a directory reflects who paid to be listed, not who fits your case. Experts who do not market themselves are absent, which excludes a large share of the academic and actively practicing physicians who make strong witnesses. Heavily marketed experts also draw predictable cross-examination on how much of their income comes from testimony.
You also do all the labor. Finding a name is the fast part of an expert witness search. Confirming availability, running conflicts, and determining whether the person will actually hold up under a Daubert challenge is the slow part, and a directory does none of it. For what to screen on qualification specifically, see qualifying an expert witness.
Directories make sense when you need a common specialty quickly, you have staff time to do the screening, or you run enough expert searches that a subscription pays for itself.
Sourcing firms
A sourcing firm delivers screened candidates rather than a list of names. The work product is a short list with CVs, fee schedules, and notes from interviews with each candidate. Comparing those fee schedules side by side is easier when you understand expert witness fee structures.
The advantages are real when the search is hard. A sourcing firm can reach experts who are not listed anywhere, which matters when the specialty is narrow or the case requires an unusual combination of qualifications. The screening also surfaces problems before you retain, including availability conflicts, exclusion history, and experts who look right on paper but discuss the case facts in ways that will not survive cross.
The tradeoff is cost per search and dependence on the firm's actual sourcing ability. Firms vary widely, and some are effectively directories with a service layer, delivering the same marketed experts you could have found yourself.
Questions worth asking any sourcing firm: what is the actual turnaround, do you interview candidates before delivery, are these experts from a proprietary database or sourced for this case, and what is included in the packet.
Direct sourcing
Finding the expert yourself works better than most attorneys expect on common specialties. Academic department pages, professional society directories, and published literature in the relevant area will produce qualified names in an afternoon.
It stops working when the specialty is narrow, when you need someone willing to testify against a local institution, or when the case requires a specific combination of credentials. It also stops working when you are under a disclosure deadline, because the response rate on cold outreach to physicians is low and slow.
How to choose
The variables that actually matter are the difficulty of the specialty, your available time, and the deadline.
For a common specialty with time on the calendar, direct sourcing or a directory is usually sufficient and cheaper. For a narrow specialty, an unusual credential combination, or a compressed deadline, a sourcing firm is generally worth the cost because the search itself is the hard part.
For firms running expert searches constantly, a directory subscription plus internal screening capacity is often the most economical model, with sourcing firms reserved for the searches that come back empty.
How Blackstorm fits
We do custom sourcing. Every candidate is identified for the specific case, contacted directly, and interviewed before you see the name. Packets include the CV, current fee schedule, and our notes from the screening call, delivered in 48 to 72 hours on standard searches.
We are not a directory and there is no database to subscribe to. If you have staff time to run outreach and screening yourself, a directory subscription may be more economical over many searches. If you would rather spend that time on the case, we do the sourcing and screening and you get candidates who have already confirmed availability. Start an expert witness search when you are ready.