How Attorneys Actually Find You (And Why Most Experts Get This Completely Wrong)
Imagine you are a board-certified colorectal surgeon in Richmond, Virginia, with decades of clinical experience and the credentials to serve as a powerful expert witness. Somewhere across the country, an attorney in Omaha, Nebraska is working a medical malpractice case and desperately needs exactly your expertise. They are making calls, searching online, and asking colleagues. Do they find you? Dr. Stephen Cohen—a board-certified colorectal surgeon and expert witness featured in Season 3, Episode 1 of On The Stand with Ashish Arun—has posed this exact question to colleagues eager to enter the medico-legal space: “If I’m a new surgeon in private practice and I want to do expert witness work and I live in Richmond, Virginia, and a patient who thinks they’re harmed walks into an attorney in Omaha, Nebraska… how do you link those two?” For most experts, the honest answer is: there is no link. Not yet. The most qualified expert in the room is often invisible to the attorneys who need them most—not because of any lack of credentials, but because they have fundamentally misunderstood how the attorney search process actually works. This article draws on in-depth conversations with attorneys and expert witnesses across multiple disciplines and seasons of On The Stand with Ashish Arun to reveal the real pipeline: how attorneys actually find experts, what channels they use, why some search approaches frustrate them, and what the most in-demand experts do differently.
