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.

The founders of JuriLytics have perhaps a stronger ideological interest in "disrupting" the current expert witness system. Amit Lakhani and University of California, Hastings College of Law acting chancellor and dean David Faigman were inspired in part by a comment from U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York as he oversaw expert witnesses discussing pseudo-science linking vaccines to autism. Weinstein noted that these expert witnesses would likely not make the same assessments linking vaccines to autism diagnoses in front of their colleagues in the field.

Lakhani said that Weinstein's comment prompted him and Faigman to use technology to create a "peer review" system of expert witnesses similar to those existing in academia. While the pair initially planned to create a neutral peer review of expert witnesses to serve judges, they found that attorneys were more interested in using peer review to undercut opposing counsel's experts.

"This is peer review in the truest sense, and it doesn't exist in the law, and it needs to. We need to get this out there, we need to get this easier and better. We need to make it easier for lawyers to make strong critiques, and we need to make it easier for science to get into the courts," Lakhani said.

JuriLytics founders are relying on technology more so to validate expertise rather than success of expert witnesses. Lakhani said that while the marketplace model can certainly help attorneys find an appropriate expert witness, often attorneys look to find an expert witness that works well with the attorney and plays well in trial rather than finding the most credible source on a matter.

"Technology is coming into play in finding a testifier, that's more of a fit issue rather than an expertise issue. We're trying to decouple the two," he said.

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