subject: How to Safely, Confidently, and Effectively Collect Data and Conduct Research as an Expert Witness [print this page] How to Safely, Confidently, and Effectively Collect Data and Conduct Research as an Expert Witness
At times, you may want to use associates, students, or employees to assist you in the collection or analysis of facts. Your attorney may suggest the use of paralegals or other employees but using your own personnel will enable you to oversee what they do, and testify about the reliability of their work. This bears on yet another Daubert-related consideration. Using your own personnel enables you to legitimately testify to your assistant's work as being routinely relied on in your particular field.
Be as organized in your collection of facts as you are meticulous in your study of it. Always attend meetings with a notebook, pen, clip board, recorder, and/or camera. Consider bringing miscellaneous other equipment that may be useful, depending on your discipline, such as magnifying glasses, flashlights, binoculars, and testing devices. Use these items to help make records of people, machines, context, and whatever else is pertinent to your opinions in this matter.
Do not rely solely on your memory of interviews or site visits. Refer to documents by identification number and date; refer to people you meet and interview by name and date. Documenting your interviews and site visits will bolster your own memory. first, an opinion requires reference to facts, measurements, or other data to be acceptable. During testimony, you must precisely identify the aspects of how and when you acquired information: dates, locations, names, or simply procedures followed. Document what you saw, heard, or discovered. Second, those notes and observations can jog your memory during subsequent analysis and study, and they may also guide you to further discovery and further explorations.
Make sure to ask those you interview the Correct spelling of their names, and leave your business card with them. This may result in extra data. They may not have had access to information at the time you met with them, or they may remember important information that they did not think of when you were there.
In essence, you must be able to explain and defend the steps you took to reach your opinion. Your expert report will include details of what you did, how you did it, and when.
The goal of your research and analyses is to logically collect data on point to the case. As you progress in this collection of relevant data, a picture will form. You will see what data relates to a particular scenario or element of the case, and how to group the materials you collect, or the results of tests you run.
If you like to organize information in files, then do so. Organize notes, documents or the materials you collect into those files. Each of those groupings may lead to a single opinion that you include in your eventual report and testimony. You can then refer to the documents as you write and build the foundation for each opinion. Finalizing opinions becomes easier if you have organized your materials such that you can readily find the information that supports each opinion.
