Attorney Jon Groth joins host Ashish Arun on On the Stand for a deep dive into the do’s and don’ts of working with expert witnesses.
From a real case derailed by a last-minute expert withdrawal to the dangers of choosing the wrong expert, Jon shares how he evaluates credibility, what to avoid, and why AI tools like ChatGPT can raise red flags in the courtroom.
He also walks through must-have clauses in expert retainer agreements that every lawyer should consider.
Perfect for legal professionals and anyone interested in the strategy behind building a winning case.
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Transcript:
If you’re reliant on one expert who maybe doesn’t have experience or I don’t know if he got cold feet or whatever reason, he didn’t wanna do it, if that expert says no. In that case, we had to settle for probably less than it’s worth because we didn’t have an expert. What advice would you give to your former self and to other attorneys?
So that they can avoid a situation like this with an expert in the future. Call you somebody. Well, so really the point behind that was with that expert, it was a treating orthopedic surgeon who had some experience as an expert, but for whatever reason, didn’t wanna have that. Next trial. Hey everyone.
Welcome to another episode of On The Stand with Ashish Arun.
Today we have with U.S. Attorney Jon Groth, the visionary founder of Groth Law Firm, a practice that’s celebrated for its relentless advocacy in personal injury law, and its groundbreaking work in niche areas like vaccine injury claims with over two decades of experience. Jon isn’t just a lawyer, he’s a strategist and a trailblazer.
A Marquette Law School graduate has argued before the Wisconsin Supreme Court twice secured multimillion dollar verdicts for clients. And earned accolades like Super Lawyer and Rising Star. A testament to his peerless reputation. But what truly sets Jon apart is his innovative spirit from trademarking his firm slogan one click that is it, sparking a nationwide legal debate to pioneering a vaccine injury practice that handles cases as far flung as Siberia. He’s redefining what it means to champion client traits beyond the courtroom. Jon is also a community leader who balances family life with outdoor adventures in Wisconsin’s wilderness.
Today we’ll dive into his journey from a basement startup to leading a multi attorney firm, his insights on expert testimony and how he emerges cutting edge to tech like Filevine with old school grid to deliver justice. So please welcome a lawyer who truly gets it, the brilliant Jon Groth. Welcome to the show.
Thank you very much. You can call me brilliant as much as you want today. It’s great for my ego. I appreciate that. I will not be miser about that. Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, it was pleasures all mine. So Jon, let’s start with your background. Like did you always wanted to be a lawyer and what was it about personal injury law that brought you where you are today. When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a pizza delivery man, but that eventually didn’t turn out too, too great. I actually went to college to be a, a jazz musician. I wanted to play saxophone, for the rest of my life and then realized I. That I didn’t like being cooped up in a practice room for hours upon hours on end.
So I got involved in student politics and political science history business and such in, in undergrad and then in law school. I wanted to be a criminal, maybe like a prosecutor or a DA in, in Wisconsin to kind of put together tho those two sides of the. Of my brain, I guess the law and then the political side, because in Wisconsin you run for office as a DA.
I had an experience where a professor called me out for not doing my homework. And I decided not to do criminal law anymore and then clerked for a personal injury firm. And I loved it. It was fantastic. Every morning I got up at 30 in the morning, drove down an hour to south of the border in Illinois to a law firm, spent it, spent the day there.
And they were just really a fascinating law firm that I learned a lot at and just got to kind of peek behind the curtain and that’s where I got the interest doing personal injury law. And then really wanted to do litigation. And I took a bunch of litigation courses in law school and then eventually got to the point where I’m now.
Wow. And, you started by yourself and now you have grown the practice to, you know, like more than 30 people. And, and you and I was listening to a couple of other interviews you’ve done and articles you’ve written where you also talk about using VAs from different countries in different time zones. So before I dive into the issues of expert witnesses, which is the main theme of the podcast. I really wanted to get your take on today’s world where it’s all connected with internet, with new age tech. That allows people to collaborate across different time zones. What’s that experience been like working with people in different time zones from different cultures, from different com countries?
Sure. People are people, no matter where you are, if you’re in Colombia, in Canada, in Siberia, wherever it is. So you’re gonna find good employees and bad employees, good team members, bad team members. We have team members who are in Mexico, we have team members who are in the Philippines. I wish it was less expensive that we could fly everybody here every few months to have a better, you know, kind of community feel.
We try to fly our team members here at least once a year. We flew one of our team members from Mexico up here. We’ve had a good experience. The only problem we have is the American tort system is different than a lot of other countries, so trying to. Find somebody who can understand that and really have a, a paradigm shift as to how we do things here and can understand liability insurance, underinsured motorist, uninsured motorist, MedPay, health insurance, all that.
The real key is finding somebody who enjoys learning, isn’t afraid to ask questions and will eventually get it, but that just takes training. And if you have somebody who’s willing to learn and sit through classes upon classes, you’re gonna find somebody. That’s good. And we have people in Mexico now and people in the Philippines now who really are fantastic members of our team.
And it doesn’t matter. They could be in West Allis, Wisconsin because like you said, technology is such that you see them on a screen just like you and me, and they could be next door, 10 feet away, or in fact, they’re thousands of miles away. Oh, that’s true. I think the primary quality that makes a good employer, a good team member is their willingness and their curiosity to learn new things.
And to ask questions. I completely agree with you on that. So let’s talk about expert witnesses. I have been in this field for a good 16, 17 years now, and there’s this one phrase that I keep hearing and we keep using. It’s probably the favorite phrase in the industry that an expert can make or break a case and, and more so in personal injury cases where a lot rides on the expert, right?
From being able to find the right expert to be able to challenge and get the other parties expert excluded. So what’s your take on how experts contribute to personal injury litigation? What is your approach to selecting the right expert witnesses for your case? You really have to understand personal injury law and what we’re able to present to a jury.
You know, what I tell clients all the time is that I want to put the entirety of your case in front of a jury. I’m only allowed to put. The future parts of your case, so your future loss of earning capacity that your future medical expenses before a jury. If I have an expert to say that, just you saying I don’t feel good and I think I’m gonna have problems in the future.
Isn’t gonna go anywhere. A judge is going to require us to have a doctor or a professional say to a reasonable degree of medical probability, meaning, you know, more likely than not that X, y, or Z is gonna happen in the future. And only when that is said, will we be able to present that evidence before a jury and ask for more money, you know, and it.
Whenever you’re able to ask for more money, the value of the case is going to go up because there’s risk, that the insurance company has to then deal with. So, that’s where it really makes or break a case. And, and it’s something that you need to know early on. Do I have the ability to ask for those, those those things, you know?
At the end of the case, a couple different things. You’re looking at liability experts. You’re looking at some damages experts. So the liability experts we deal with all the time. I just had a zoom meetings last two weeks with a liability expert about an accident reconstruction. You know, somebody who’s an engineer whose job it is to look at how a crash occurred and see.
What color the lights are, how fast people were going, you know, all that kind of stuff. And that you hire those kind of experts right away so you can see whether it’s a case that we should actually be taking. Because sometimes the police get it wrong and they may have somebody at fault when that person isn’t, because science is right.
You know? So you have those kind of experts. And then you have other experts that are doctors or a vocational expert, a legal nurse consultant, you know, something like that needs to get involved. The midway at the midway point of the case when a client’s maybe still treating her on the end of the treatment plan so we can analyze what the future care is going to be.
So they’re invaluable with a case, you know, having somebody who’s there. And I can tell you stories. I had a case 20 years ago where, an expert destroyed my case because expert work. Wrote a report and my client was treating with this doctor. Doctor said, I will help you. And then when it came down to getting ready for trial, I called the expert and he’s like, not doing it.
He’s like, well, but all you have to do is just read your report. That’s all I need you to do. He said, I’m not gonna do it. I, I don’t know what to do. I can’t do anything because now I have to in essence ask the judge for permission to cancel the trial, push the trial back, get a new expert. Well, that’s gonna look bad.
You have all these things where if you’re reliant on one expert, who maybe doesn’t have experience or I don’t know if he got cold feet or, whatever reason, he didn’t wanna do it. If that expert says no big trouble. And that case we had to settle for probably less than it’s worth because we didn’t have an expert.
And what advice would you give to your former self and to other attorneys so that they can avoid a situation like this with an expert in the future? The point behind that was with that expert, it was a treating orthopedic surgeon who had some experience as an expert, but for whatever reason, didn’t wanna have that next trial.
And my recollection was that he was a little bit older, was on the verge of retiring and said, I’m just not. It’s not worth it. You know, the stress of sitting next to a lawyer or being in court for that day, it’s just not worth it for me, so I’m not gonna do it. Even though he had committed to it, you know, a year before.
So if you can find somebody who doesn’t mind the give and take of litigation and enjoys that kind of work, if you can find somebody who’s qualified and is experienced in litigation and enjoys it is committed to you and to the truth, they’re worth their weight and gold usually what my understanding is that as an expert witness.
Especially doctors or life care planners, they would look at a lot of records for a lot of cases, but not all the cases would get to trial or even deposition. A lot of them would settle before that. So in your experience, give or take a few, but what percentage of cases. Would actually get to deposition or trial that an expert will be called to testify.
I say this pretty frequently, so I think I’m pretty accurate. All of our cases, if you’re looking at all the cases that we look at on a, a daily, weekly, yearly basis about 90% of those cases settle before a lawsuit’s filed. And then of the cases where we file a lawsuit, about 95% of those settle before trial.
So we’ve had. One trial this year. Last year we were supposed to have, some trials. They didn’t go. They were actually pushed back. So we, and we had no trials last year, so, you know, I believe we’re scheduled to have four trials this year. We already had one, so five total. But we’re, we have plenty of cases that we filed that will probably settle at mediation and many of them that are gonna settle before any depositions are even taken because you file a lawsuit and then you get more information and then right away, there’s negotiation that if that takes place of the chance of getting the trial nowadays is pretty slim.
Yeah, so when you’re looking to pick an expert witness, and you’d probably come across several options depending on the area of expertise you’re looking at. So what attributes do you usually look at when you are picking one after you have spoken to them or looked at the cv? Like, what’s your process? If you can just walk us through that.
Sure. So specialty number one, you know, do they have experience in this particular science or area of expertise and do they have experience? Testifying is great, but it’s not required because we can always help them through that. I understand. Just vaguely, you know, what’s gonna happen and there’s lots of YouTube videos out there of people getting deposed, so that’s not very hard to, you know, have them understand.
And certainly when you tell them. All you have to do is tell the truth. It becomes a lot easier, right, to sit down there and get deposed, and then just your general demeanor. If you have somebody who can talk like you and I are talking and we know is gonna be kind of a voice of fresh air, fresh air for the jury, that’s nice.
You know, somebody who has maybe a teaching background and can explain things to a jury without using words that have about 35 syllables. That’s a big difference. Whenever I see. A defense law firm using them. It makes me nervous because I really think that these particular experts are good in front of a jury and are really easy to, to, well, easy to understand and juries get ’em.
That’s really important is being a, a teacher, you know, being somebody that can identify. Complex and make it easy to understand. A lot of experts also talk about trying to maintain or be as close as the 50 50 ratio for plaintiff and defense. Do you really care about that? Is, is it truly a factor for an expert when you are looking at experts or when juries are looking at an expert or this something that is very subjective and it’s all in the expert’s head?
What’s your take on that? Yeah, if, if I see an expert, because there are a few experts in Wisconsin that do. Plus percent for defense. When you become an expert and you know, maybe you’re going through an agency and you can see the financials of that expert, and it comes out that the expert has earned literally millions of dollars a year just doing defense work.
Well, in my opinion, the, the credibility of that expert is a lot less, and I don’t think that expert really cares. And we see that more, even though we don’t do it, but we see it in, in workers’ compensation because experts rarely ever have to testify in workers’ compensation, just all off of documents.
Right. So. They’re ultimately not cross-examined and they don’t have to answer for what they, what they’ve made working for insurance companies. So when those experts enter the personal injury world, and we get a chance to sit down across from them and ask them, well, how come you earned a million dollars last year simply working for American Family Insurance?
I think that is good for me, good for the plaintiff, and bad for them, and it’s not really credible. So, . That’s the worst case scenario I think, for an expert is when you’re, when you’re taking so much money from one particular client, and if it’s one particular insurance company, especially, I don’t know how you get off from that.
I mean, that, that just the fact if it’s closer to, you know, 60, 40, 50 50. I think just common sense says that a jury’s gonna look at that and say, okay, well that seems, it seems fair to me. Late last year, we had dealt with an expert who was right there who told me. I, I take cases from both sides and you can look at my track record and see, and there’s a service, some probably similar to one of your services that you can see.
Who they’ve testified for X number of years and it’s like, oh yeah, this person is on both sides. So they’re gonna be harder to cross examine, harder to, to disqualify. So now what do we do? I think it’s difficult, , when you come up on an expert who has such experience on both sides of the aisle
telling something. Are there any specific rules which are really specific to Wisconsin personal injury law? That you explain to experts when you are trying to retain them, or you may or experts should know when they’re working in the state of Wisconsin. Sure. So in Wisconsin, most of the time we need to have a written cv, not just something on online that has like a history.
I’d like to have, , a, , a professional resume because the judges want see the professional resume. You know, it, it’s somewhat, somewhat of federal court, but not exactly so. I want a professional resume, a written report, not just medical records, but some written report that is signed by the doctor that’s usually preferred.
And then a history of cases that they’ve worked on. So those three things are always required, but they’re, I. Probably most of the courts, most of the scheduling orders in Wisconsin, , will require that experts have to produce that at a certain time. So, and hopefully the lawyer that you’re working with will tell you, okay, you know, Dr.
So-and-so, you’re gonna need to get us these documents by X date. You know, there are some counties that say you just need to name experts. , but most of the counties in Wisconsin, I believe, say that you have to have written documentation from your experts. Do you always have to disclose the name of your expert in Wisconsin?
Because is it because in New York, in , certain cases, I think in medical malpractice cases, the plaintiff side only has to describe the expert. They don’t really have to even give the name of the expert to the other side. At the time of, , making these disclosures though, that law, it looks like there, there’s a movement to try and change that.
So is that, , similar in Wisconsin or is it different? Well, that would be awesome if I could say my expert is six foot three, you know, dark hair, wears sunglasses or whatever else likes long walks of the beach. No, we, we don’t, we don’t have that that, that’s interesting. Certainly if you’re a consulting expert, then we don’t have to name you, you know, you’re just in the background and, and that.
I would assume is universal across the nation. But no, in Wisconsin, most of the time you’re gonna have discovery or written questions, interrogatories request, request of documents from the defense right away asking for information on your experts. And then once you decide on an expert, then the courts not only will you have to respond to discovery, but then the courts require in your scheduling order, you know the judge has signed order that by X to date, you need to have.
This expert’s information disclosed. , and that’s pretty universal here. Another key aspect that working with experts involved is probably the experts retainer agreement. Now, this is something that is a hot topic of discussion in the expert community. Okay? As to, you know, what should be in the retainer agreement, what should experts be careful about?
A lot of experts are worried about upfront payments and attorneys not paying them if, especially if they lose the case. In fact, that was a key recommendation that we got from another trial attorney who we had interviewed a few weeks ago that always try and make sure that you get paid. When you’re being, I think that makes sense for anything.
Right? We had some work done in our kitchen -. And the guy wanted, , 40% down or something and then, you know, X amount when he was two thirds of the way done, and then, you know, the remainder of the balance upon completion. I think that’s just a smart business practice that you get money upfront and I think it keeps everybody honest.
Certainly if in the documents that you say, you know, I’m asking for your honest opinion on. What’s going on? I think that goes back to maybe a question you’re gonna follow up on with, you know, disclosures or documents that are exchanged between you and your expert. You know, I always tell experts you have to assume everything that you’re looking at relating to this case or any email, any document is gonna be.
On a, on a screen blown up for the jury to see. So if it’s communication between you and me, even if it’s the, the very first letter saying, you know, hi, I’m Jon Groth, I wanna talk to you about a case, , that’s gonna be blown up on a screen. So a jury’s gonna look at that and say, well, what did they mean?
What exactly are they trying to get from this communication? Right? So, , having that out there. I think it’s the honest and truthful way to work, and it kinda makes sense that people understand, a jury’s gonna understand that a doctor could be doing surgery or could be doing research, and they’re getting paid to do that, so they’re gonna get paid to do our stuff.
So, , do you have a one or two pointers that you can suggest to experts that these are like some of the key things that you must have in your retainer agreement when you are working with an attorney? Yeah. , in general, the retainer agreements that I see is that they’re, they’re very simple. -. So I’ll say that it’s not something where you’re having some complex language.
Something that I, I, I would like to see is document retention. What are they gonna do with documents? , are they gonna keep documents for a period of time? Are they gonna destroy the documents right away? We’ve had situations where doctors have written the report and then destroy the documents for, I, I don’t know.
Why, but because they just thought that they were over with. , ’cause they don’t know the process maybe. And then when they’re asked months later, like, oh, well now I need to see all the documents again. It’s gonna cost me X amount more. And it’s like, oh my gosh, doctor, why did you destroy the documents?
But it makes sense. Why have all these pieces of paper or whatever. I mean, that’s. More paper as opposed to now it’s digital, you know, I guess it’s, it’s much easier. So I guess I’m dating myself on that one, but having a document retention policy and then just simply discussing that. This is what is asked of the expert, right?
, that we want your honest opinion on X, Y, and Z, because that’s going to be asked of defense counsel or the other side’s gonna be asking, what were you retained to do? And make sure that’s clear in the outset or at the outset, right? How. And really those are the two things that I’m, I’m looking for initially.
I’m sure if you ask me next week, I’ll have a different experience. Yeah. And I’ll probably have a different answer. But today, based on my experience, these that the past few weeks and months, those are my two things. A new development that we are seeing is that experts are using generative AI to write their expert reports.
And then what’s happening is that Gen AI is hallucinating and coming up with, oh my gosh. Publications that don’t exist, and then experts are not verifying that and putting it in their expert report. In fact, two weeks ago, a federal code excluded a Stanford professor as an expert witness because the Stanford professor used Chad GPT to help , write his report.
Chad GPT came up with two citations for publications that were all made up, and this professor did not crosscheck it. When he usually cross checks all his academic writings for hallucinations, but his expert report he did not check and the cherry on top was that this case was about the dangers of using ai.
And he was an expert on ai. So isn’t he just lazy? Isn’t that just the indication of that’s when you, you can’t bite off more than you can chew, right? I mean, is that because you’re, you’re, you’re just doing too much and you don’t have the time to spend that extra hour, that cross checking? Yeah. I mean, he was apologetic about it.
And even though he report. Itself was not defective, but because it contained, , hallucinated fake citations, the code excluded the whole report. So now my question is, , given that more and more experts are using genai and Genai is not like it’s great, but it’s not a hundred percent reliable. So as an attorney, how comfortable or how worried do you feel that the next expert you’ll hire, you’ll send them the medical records and they may just upload the whole zip file or all the PDFs on chat GPT, and derive analysis from there?
Isn’t there confidentiality concerns if you’re putting it into the open AI world? So. , we use AI in our practice literally every day. Yeah. , but our system through File Vine, and this is shout out to File Vine. I, I was, I flew out to Salt Lake last week and met with their AI gurus, , and Elliot and those guys and his team are brilliant or geniuses and talking about how they have.
Their AI in a box. It’s not gonna search and hallucinate from other things. So I would hope that if you’re at Stanford, well, I guess it’s not true though, but if you’re at a alerted institution that they have the ability to keep AI under control. So it’s not gonna hallucinate. I guess that’s a big concern if you know.
I had a conversation this past weekend. There’s an attorney who has a case, a nationwide practice, just happens to be in Wisconsin and they have a case in a different state, and the other side was caught using AI and had some, some, some sites from made up hallucinations. You know, that I can understand because maybe it’s a small shop of, you know, one attorney or a couple attorneys and they can’t afford to have a product that won’t hallucinate, but.
If you’re a doctor, somebody who’s expected to have certainly a review of confidential information, and then you’re putting that patient’s medical records into a portal that could be then cited or used by AI in general. I think that’s a concern and that that’s actually something that, I’m glad we discussed it now because now I need to talk to that.
I need to talk to our. Our team here and see what, what we have, just to ensure that any experts that we talk to don’t just use in general the open ai. That’s a great point. You need to solve that problem. You need to create something. Do you have a service that is, , non hallucinating, you know, where you can have medical records reviewed?
There are, , companies now that are working in this direction, or like we have, like we have this, . Friend, , like his name is Dr. Chris Brigham and he’s written a couple of guides for the a MA on injury assessment and different things, like he’s been an educator for a long time, so he’s been working on a medical history intake, , solution using ai.
But even with the, , like the open platforms like Open ai, a lot depends on the prompts you are giving. And because, , usually experts are not experts on using ai. So we can all be very naive in the way we are using ai, and , we may just upload the document and not ask the right questions, and then the AI can hallucinate and come back with answers.
Even OpenAI has settings where you can check a box that says, don’t train on my data, don’t train on the chats I’m having or the documents I’m providing, so you have the ability to turn it off. Which is where these spec, the specialized vendors like Phile, like Cleo like or Thomson Reuters Lexus, has a great Lexus AI product that what it does is it restricts the responses to the data that these companies are providing or the records that you’re referencing.
That really helps cut down the hallucinations and make sure that the responses you are getting. Are from the text or the context that you have provided. Yeah. And now a lot of, , the AI responses, they also cite to the sources. When they’re research, like searching the internet and they’re giving you a response, they also hyperlink it out to which websites are contributing to this section of the answer.
Like Google, , Gemini does that. So to answer your question, no, we don’t have a product because we are not in that line. We are not offering a medical record reviews tech solution. But we do use AI now to help attorneys quickly find experts because that’s, that’s a problem that we have, we’ve been trying to solve, where we take expert resumes and then we tell AI that analyze the resume and based on the resume, tell us all the different areas of expertise and their various combinations that this person is an expert on.
So now that way, if.
Somebody who’s a life care planner and has done a lot of work in a particular type of injury, and they don’t use that keyword in their directory listings or their headlines, but they have probably written a paper on that, or they have used a similar phrase, they now, our AI tool is able to use that and show you those experts first.
Yeah, that, okay. Like based on your query, these are the experts who match your query. That. So that is how we are, , using ai. And there are other users of ai, like for example, you look at an expert’s history on and ask them, okay, what are, which, which are the cases where this was the issue that the expert talked about?
Or they were excluded, where their methodology was challenged? And then what were the specific challenges to the methodology? What does have to say about it? Yeah. So I can see AI being a huge role in how attorneys work with experts. But I agree with your advice for experts that try and stay away from using AI right now unless, until it’s a tool that’s approved by your attorney.
Because a lot rides on the report of the experts. If the expert messes up, it’s, it’s somebody’s life. Yeah, totally. That’s a huge concern is that if they’re doing something behind the scenes that I’m not aware of, that’s gonna cost my client their chance, maybe their only chance, if that’s a problem.
Interesting. As a follow up question, experts are also very worried about personal attacks on them. Things that are out there in social media. The fact that they will advertise, they like have a listing with a, , online directory, or they have a website. A lot of experts get attacked by both sides on these aspects.
And I personally have read. Deposition transcripts of specific experts who have been in the industry for 20, 25 years now, and they have been asked the same questions about their website, their directory listings back in the day and even today. And I personally have not seen a real impact on the jury’s assessment of the expert or something like this leading to an expert’s exclusion.
But it’s also a matter of preference. So what is your take on the fact that an expert may have a website, they may write articles, blogs, do podcasts, or have an online presence trying to market their practice in maybe a tasteful way. I can tell you from my personal experience, I had taken a deposition of an expert and the expert said, yes, I advertise.
I also practice, and my days are four days a week seeing patients in one day a week with my expert practice. I still have to advertise. So I have stuff to do that one day a week. And the hospital advertises. And in general you don’t see it, but there’s marketing going on in the background for my hospital practice, everybody’s advertising.
That’s just the way it is nowadays, which I think is a pretty good answer. And if you have somebody who has that experience over, over the years and their. Smart with their advertising. The advertising doesn’t say, if you’re a defense attorney, call me. ’cause you know, wink, wink. I’m, I’m your person. It says, , hopefully because they’re honest and a good person that, , I will give you an honest answer.
You know, I’m a leader in the field on X, Y, and Z and therefore you wanna call me because I’ll, I’ll let you know. So. Those are the best advertisements. I think there was a, a chiropractor years ago who had on their website, in essence, I call them the anti Chiropractor. Chiropractor because this person had a, a, you know, DC behind their name, but really didn’t believe that people should go to chiropractors more than, , if it was six visits or six weeks.
It was something really kind of crazy. But they were very limiting in what they believed. It was something that I think the. Association in that chiropractor state was at odds with them. So the chiropractic association in the state said something else and they were members of that association and their website said the exact opposite.
So I call ’em the car anti chiropractic chiropractor. So if you’re advertising that, it just gives me a lot of ammunition. So I have no problem with advertising. And nowadays you have to. Yeah. ’cause that’s, especially with websites ’cause that’s how people find you. , there aren’t, you know, phone books back in the day.
Maybe you could have that. And it’s harder to search phone books and try to find something to disqualify an expert based on a phone book ad, just because you have to what? Drive to all the different communities to find phone book ads or whatever. But websites are easier to find, but it’s a necessary evil.
I mean, experts need to be easy to find because otherwise a big cost for, , a lot of plaintiff attorneys firms is the cost. They pay a broker. To get them the, to get them an expert that they can then retain. -. And that cost is on top of, , what you’re paying the expert. I’m not saying that it’s not important because it saves you a lot of time.
It saves an attorney a lot of time when, , you don’t have to reach out to 10 different experts, assess their availability if they are conflict free, are they interested? Are they the right fit? Finds do have, , an important role, but if an attorney, maybe they don’t have the budget or maybe you have the staff to do the groundwork for you, then if an expert has their contact information available, they have a website and it’s easy to contact them.
I think that in itself is a great service to. At least the attorneys who need their services. Yeah, I think it certainly depends. I mean, let’s say you’re a solo practitioner, so you’re, you know, one attorney who you aren’t able to fund a case, you have to take out a line of credit or a mortgage or whatever to fund a case.
Well, you’re gonna try to figure out how can I save money? And that may not be the best for your client, right? Yeah. So how do you do it? Efficiently. Certainly, you know, you always wanna be a good trustee for your client’s money because ultimately the costs of a case are gonna come outta the client’s portion if there’s a recovery.
, unless maybe some states have cases where clients are. Paying for the costs upfront or -. If it’s litigation that’s, , corporate, commercial litigation, it’s a little bit different. But, , with personal injury, usually if there’s a recovery, then the attorney gets paid back for all the costs that were spent in the case.
Being able to have experts that you can trust is, is his. So important and experts you can call. And maybe that’s where the, you know, those agencies will have a bigger benefit is that you can call the agency and say, I have these five questions on a potential case. Yeah. And because they want your service, they want your, they’ll put you in touch with an expert, give you some hopefully honest answers, and then they want to have you then spend the extra cash to go and use their experts.
What are some other skills and knowledge areas that you think experts should work on developing to be a better expert? Sure. A good bedside manner. Somebody who comes across as a decent, honest person. There’s a place for there. The Sheldons of the world, who’s maybe not the most pleasant to talk to, that’s fine.
But if you can be not only knowledgeable in your area of expertise, but be able to explain that to others, that’s a huge deal. There are experts that I go back to time and time again because I know that they will be able to explain the complex in a really. Great way, and, and you know, we’ve used high school science teachers, we’ve used certainly college professors more often than, than, than not.
People who have that experience. Teaching, I think is certainly important. In, in Milwaukee we have, , medical College of Wisconsin. It’s a teaching institution, so you have a lot of doctors who have to teach, you know, who have to explain this. They’re explaining it to other doctors, but still, you know, having that ability to talk to others is really, .
Really important. Thanks a lot, Jon. This was, you know, like a really interesting, very insightful discussion on experts on the kind of work that you’ve been doing. We were also able to touch upon the use of AI and the warning that experts, if you want to use ai, make sure attorney knows, because we are starting to see a lot of cases go haywire because an expert used ai, the attorney probably did not know about it.
-And the other side caught it or the judge caught it, and a lot hangs in balance on the expert’s testimony. So if you’re excluded because of using ai, that’s a huge disservice you’d be doing to the client and the attorney who’s hired you. Where can our listeners learn more about you, your practice?
Thanks. Yeah.
grothlawfirm.com. G-R-O-T-H law firm.com. We have a podcast that’s Groth Gets it! it’s on all the, all the channels. , Instagram, TikTok, all that too. So, yeah, if you just look for Groth Law Firm, that’s our handle from most social media. We’re there. We’ll definitely make sure to put links to your website and your Instagram and TikTok handles in the show notes.
Awesome. So our listeners can, , quickly reach out. Thank you so much for your time today, Jon. This was everything I hoped it would be and I hope to be able to do this again sometime. Hey, anytime. I appreciate thanks for having me. Thank you. So that was Attorney Jon Groth. We’ll be back next week with another guest.
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