You Need An Expert Witness, But Where Do You Find One?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Dave Scriven-Young:

Hello everyone and welcome to Litigation Radio. I’m your host, Dave Scriven-Young. I’m a commercial and environmental litigator in the Chicago office of Peckar and Abramson, which is recognized as the largest law firm serving the construction industry with 115 lawyers and 11 offices around the us. On this show, we talk to the country’s top litigators and judges to discover best practices in developing our careers, winning cases, getting more clients, and building a sustainable practice. Please be sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcasting app to make sure you’re getting updated with future episodes. This podcast is brought to you by the Litigation section of the American Bar Association. It’s where I make my home in the ABA. The Litigation section provides litigators of all practice areas, resources we need to be successful advocates for our clients. Learn [email protected] slash Litigation. When litigators take on complex Litigation for their clients, one of the first set of questions that gets asked is, do we need an expert?

What kind of expert do we need? And do we know anyone who can serve as that expert? Well, today we’re going to talk with someone who has revolutionized the process of finding and retaining expert witnesses shaping the legal landscape. Along the way, we’ll discuss the evolving trends, best practices, and future outlook of expert witness services. And of course, our guest is Russ Rosenzweig, who is the CEO of Roundtable Group. Russ pioneered and invented the expert witness search and referral industry in 1993 along with this fellow Roundtable group. Co-Founders Roundtable Group is the premier provider of expert witness services for law firms and businesses worldwide. With over a quarter century of providing great expert witnesses, they have become known as the expert witness firm you go to when the outcome of your client’s case really matters. And beyond his work as a CEO of Roundtable Group, Russ is a speaker, author, educator, and philanthropist. Russ, welcome to the show.

Russ Rosenzweig:

Thanks for having me, Dave. It’s a pleasure to be here and no one has really ever called me a revolutionary or a pioneer before, so thank you right out of the gate.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Well, you’re welcome. And let’s talk about your pioneering ways. I understand you have a very interesting story of how the Roundtable Group got started starting at Northwestern University. So tell us a little bit about how the company was founded.

Russ Rosenzweig:

It is a fun little story and almost exactly 30 years ago when my two co-founders, Bob and Chris and I were having a realization that we didn’t have any job offers yet, and it was February of our senior year, so I wanted to be a management consultant. That was sort of my dream, but some of the management consulting firms weren’t even recruiting undergrads out of Northwestern that year, so it was very difficult for my classmates, and by this time in February, we needed a plan B and one evening at Willard Hall at Northwestern, we started imagining what should we do if no one hires us? I think I put forth the idea of starting our own management consulting firm, which garnered quite a few laughs because at 21, none of us had any kind of expertise that anyone would pay money for, but my colleagues and I were sort of products of the New Jersey public school system and at Northwestern, the teaching was just so great.

I went on shortly afterwards to get an MBA at the University of Chicago. So I just couldn’t believe how Dazzlingly masterful these professors were just real rock stars in their field. That became our startup idea. What if we start a consulting firm of professors and Dave From the very beginning we had scaling mind, so it was like let’s invite every professor to be part of a kind of loose consortium. We called Roundtable Group and our purpose was basically to find them gigs as a compliment to their teaching and research. I know Uber always gets the credit for starting the gig economy, but we like to think we were helping academics find extracurricular, well paying engagements 30 years prior. Professors like the idea, we were sort of flattering and complimentary and rock stars typically have agents and managers who help them with their commercial lives, and that was the pitch we did to profs and they liked it.

And many hundreds really thousands sort of signed up with us. We were using email at that time, Dave, it’s very novel. In the mid nineties, not many people were on email, but academics were and they were able to basically attach their cvs, their resumes in an email, which allowed us to create a searchable database of experts, really PhDs and MDs and other specialists. And kind of the unlikely conclusion of that whole thing was the only clients who ever called us between then and now for kind of introductions or referral requests to this kind of caliber of experts were litigators. So we kind of accidentally pretty quickly from the time of our launch turned ourselves into an expert witness search and referral firm, but that wasn’t the initial plan and it was kind of a very fun dorm room startup experience.

Dave Scriven-Young:

And I was going to ask you, so was the initial thought that you’d be finding them speaking engagements or maybe putting on some grand seminar or something like that, or were you thinking more along the lines of using the expertise of these professors to do things like Litigation testimony or consulting and that sort of thing?

Russ Rosenzweig:

Well, we were imagining everything except legal related. So we conceptualized primarily professors serving as consultants in the context of other management consulting engagements. So I remember calling McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group and Hey, you guys should engage some of our experts. It’s just kind of a compliment to your team and you’ll bring this kind of world class PhD level expertise to a consulting engagement. I remember so vividly the gracious McKinsey partners who had me in their Chicago office just looking at me like totally startled and expressed to me, Russ, we’re the experts, not you. So none of that early stuff we tried around pitching our professors as experts and all kinds of different contexts really worked until we got that magical call a couple of years into the process from a litigator actually our very first client, it was such an incredible kind of phone call and meeting with him because first of all, there was urgency.

He had this pretty immediate need for a variety of experts. It was an IP matter and it was a pretty long phone call and meeting about all kinds of nuances and complexities with respect to his case. I think it was actually going to be like a Texas jury in a very complicated IP matter in which he needed computer scientists and I think some economists, so one of the criteria is that beyond excellent credentials, he needed experts who would appeal to the jury there. So no New Yorkers, no one from la. He was especially looking for people with the proper southern drawl to be comfortable in that venue. And there were just so many nuances and conflict issues and discovery considerations, and we just had this aha moment that it can be very time consuming and inefficient for litigators to do this kind of work to find the candidates and vet them and screen them and have 20 plus phone calls with potential candidates. And we had this amazing database and access to the experts and realized we had a skillset at this particular line of work. Plus it was so intellectually interesting and stimulating to work on these very important disputes involving the leading companies of the day. So it was just a match made in heaven for us. It was just so cool to have our career really get defined for us in those early days.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Yeah, and you mentioned finding an expert witness can be incredibly inefficient and expensive. Most lawyers when thinking about getting an expert thinking their brains talk to their colleagues, Hey, we’re looking for an expert in this area. Who do you know? And who have you used in the past? And maybe you’re sending an email to your firm colleagues asking them, have you used, who have you used in the past on this issue? And that could be, again, extremely inefficient. So how do you go about doing that? How does Roundtable Group fill that gap?

Russ Rosenzweig:

Yeah, Dave, it’s funny you mentioned that because almost as a hobby plus it’s been my kind of professional duty for the past 30 years. Almost every day I ask litigators, how do you find your experts? Just in the course of my business development work and the CLE presentations we do, and it’s just a question I’ve been asking for decades, and the answer has remained the same all these years. And exactly as you expressed it, database, I don’t know who do we know? Who did we use last time? Ask the client more recently in the past decade plus, you do a Google search too, and it’s perfectly good that methodology, but it’s not like my professors at the University of Chicago and Northwestern would not call that the world’s most thorough and rigorous methodology for finding your experts. And the thing is, sometimes a case can turn on that very expert.

So I’ve always just been an advocate of you got to just be very thorough and very, very rigorous when it comes to finding candidates and vetting them and picking the right one. And as tempting as it may be, you can’t just hire the one from last time. You can’t just call the economic damages firm that you used the last couple of times because there might be a world class different professor of economics, not even at a firm who is just so perfect for that new matter. And the problem is it’s just like too time consuming for a litigator to do this work. It can take 10 to 20 hours to be really thorough and really rigorous in finding potential candidates and another 10 to 20 hours plus to call ’em all up and interview them and vet ’em. So I’ve just found it to be very inefficient for lawyers to do this work, but pretty fun and efficient for us to do it because it’s Lord knows all we’ve ever done professionally.

And I think one of the keys to our ability to do it is that I have 40 colleagues now, and for the most part, they’re all lawyers or engineers who are former US, PTO examiners who’ve been with us for a decade plus. And so my colleagues just know how to read a complaint. We know how to read patents. We know how to have a very in-depth conversation with a client about all the nuances and case facts and discovery considerations and really get on the dot with what the perfect expert looks like. And then we have the time, we have the technology, we have the databases, we have the resources to do that thorough and rigorous search, and that’s been our life’s work for my whole career since college.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Can you highlight some best practices for finding an expert witness that litigators can use in finding that perfect expert witness?

Russ Rosenzweig:

Well, I think there’s two steps, Dave. First, before you even get to work finding an expert, you got to be on the dot with what you’re looking for, with what you need. And half the time we play a role even in brainstorming with the Litigation team about what that perfect expert looks like. The obvious main item is just credentials. Do they have the required skillset in that subject matter area? But there are so many other nuances to consider. For example, prior testifying experience. A lot of times our clients are just kind of habitually will say, oh yeah, we want a seasoned testifying expert. But sometimes the best and most qualified expert, particularly in a high tech field, is maybe an assistant or associate professor who’s written every article who’s doing pioneering cutting edge work. Maybe they have been in the Litigation process but never got to the testifying part in part because they’re so good at this tech, so brilliant at it that cases often settled.

They often win teaching awards and would be perfect for the testimony role, but just don’t have it yet. And so we often encourage our clients to consider even candidates who don’t have testifying experience and also communication skills and persuasiveness is so important, but sometimes a great expert and communicate well in a jury context and isn’t winning teaching awards but is so good at the field and could be a great consulting expert. So there’s a whole long laundry list of things to consider before you even roll up your sleeves and start looking for experts. And once you have gone through that, what I might call meta decision process or checklist, thinking through all the various criteria for your expert, then you got to roll up your sleeves and get to work finding potential candidates. And that’s the part where I just in my maybe biased opinion, feel so strongly that there’s no substitute for rigor and thoroughness.

And you got to first question, do you have time for doing this task of finding the candidates or is it better to outsource it? But I’ll share with you, Dave, just in the spirit of speaking of rigor, some of the things that we recommend if a lawyer is going to do it himself or herself, first of all, you do want to proceed with the habitual. Who do we know who we used last time? Ask the client, do a Google search. That’s all good. Don’t stop doing that. Just don’t make that the entirety of the methodology. Second is on the topic of the Google search, very few litigators are aware of how powerful that Google Search bar is. And I think so many lawyers are in the habit of just typing in the area of expertise you need into that Google search bar. And then you get 2 million pages and no one has time to go through that whole thing.

But there’s like advanced boo techniques you can use to kind of dial in what you’re looking for within that Google search bar and only search within resumes and cvs. And Google has every CV in the world. So we’ve spent many years kind of honing and refining how to do really advanced expert searches using that Google search bar. And another technique, Dave, that is kind of the hot buzzword, UR is AI and big data. And the cool part of finding expert witnesses is all of the most cutting edge techniques and AI algorithms are already baked into various platforms like Google Scholar and a minor and Web of Knowledge and even PubMed for highly complex medical research related issues. Google Scholar with some widgets that we built allows you to search every article that’s ever been published, the topic of interest for your expert witness. And not that a litigator has time to read hundreds of articles, but you can parse them out and quickly find the authors and co-authors and citations.

And there’s your list of potential expert witness candidates. And when it comes to practitioners and not academics, of course there’s LinkedIn and Indeed and Monster and many other sites and resources that especially when you pay the ridiculously expensive most premium version of let’s say LinkedIn as we do, you can really dial in and fine practitioners and even engage with them obviously using LinkedIn’s methods. And there’s all these static databases too, Dave, like Juris Pro and m and experts.com and Seek. And these are ones where experts pay to be on them, and it’s only one out of every 20 times do you find a great expert on those sites? But we search them every time because one out of 20 times the perfect expert is there, and I could go on all day about this, David Trade associations, there’s calling university department chairs. There’s even good old Amazon like the book part, which is so powerful and has literally every book published and unpublished ever written. And again, doing a rigorous search on that will show you the books and show you the authors and co-authors. There’s a whole other variety of potential expert witness candidates. So those are the techniques we use. Of course, we also have this database of 500,000 professors and experts that we’ve been building since that Northwestern dorm room time that it’s also very helpful that most lawyers don’t have. But all those things collectively will likely get you a nice potential kind of universe of candidates to study.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Yeah, that’s amazing. And I mean, I learned so much just from listening to what you had to say just then, and it occurs to me in my practice, which is partly working for the construction industry, the practitioner part of it, the non-academic, the contractor who has been in the business for 50 years and perhaps someone who just retired and is looking for kind of a gig on the side, those are so powerful in front of a jury because they have done the work and they understand the industry, they understand what happened in your case to the core because they worked in that area. And so a much different quality of background than a college professor, for example. So I assume Roundtable Group can assist in finding those folks as well.

Russ Rosenzweig:

Yes, Dave. In fact, a good 50% of the requests we’ve been getting over the years are for non-academic practitioners. So thanks for saying that because while we’re very proud of our academic roots with that whole professorial story that I told you, more often than not, it’s a practitioner that’s needed. And sometimes it’s just very, especially even more time consuming to find that on the DOT person who’s been in an industry for decades that maybe has recently retired or became a consultant, and where the conflict issues are manageable because of their newer career. And we really spend a great deal of our time helping lawyers find those practitioners. And I’m glad you mentioned it too, Dave, because a lot of times I think our beloved fellow ABA Litigation section members don’t really kind of understand what we do often. They’re just a round table group, what kind of experts do you have in-house? And it’s none because we’re just a search and research firm and try to leave no stone unturned, whether it’s a practitioner or a medical doctor or a professor that might be needed for really any kind of matter on any topic.

Dave Scriven-Young:

And you mentioned one of the things that lawyers need to do is to really hone in on what type of expert they need. And I think oftentimes the question is, well, I don’t know, because you don’t know what’s going to come up in a case you don’t know what issues perhaps if you’re the plaintiff, what the defense might raise. Is that something that you do some consulting with folks on your staff to help lawyers kind of figure out, okay, well you really need an expert on this particular issue as opposed to that particular issue and I can help find an expert in that area?

Russ Rosenzweig:

Yes, Dave. It’s often our initial conversation really is a brainstorm. Many of our clients and Litigation section members have such a diverse array of engagements that they do and not necessarily specialists in one field only. So one day they need medical doctors, the next day economists, the next day engineers and computer scientists. And so every case just has so many nuances and different directions. And so we often find ourselves kind of in that brainstorming mode of dialing into the different kinds of credentials that might be needed. Often the answer is, well, let’s try for all three approaches and just be even more rigorous and talk to candidates across the spectrum. And then of course, beyond just credentials and that brainstorm are the other criteria that we covered briefly earlier, like the prior testifying experience and communication skills. But there’s so many other criteria to think about, even just as simple as geographic location is that important, less and less these days, but sometimes the Texas story, I told you it’s critical when I started 30 years ago, figuring out the reputation of an expert or their sort of social media profile was an impossibility.

But these days it’s doable to do a little bit of research and kind of look at other angles. And there’s even more nuanced criteria to think about. Is an expert willing to kind of impartially self-select themselves? Do they have the courage to express this matter is not really perfect for me, but you should call my colleagues be even better. Are they well published on the topic? Are they collaborative and fun and enjoyable to work with? Would they know how to actually write that report that you need or prepare for a complicated deposition or testimony? So the criteria for selecting experts are really endless, but it’s just so good if we have a chance to kind of discuss that with clients and really help them think through all these considerations rather than just sort of forbid, I don’t know, I’m just going to call the expert I used last time and leave it at that.

Dave Scriven-Young:

And do you do vetting of the potential expert witnesses? I imagine you’re doing all these searches, you’re getting a list of names. Are you sending those directly to the litigators your clients, or are you doing some sort of vetting beforehand to kind of let the lawyers know exactly what they’re all about and your not recommendation, but perhaps some perspective on their prior work?

Russ Rosenzweig:

Yeah, I’m glad you asked Dave because that’s the whole kind of next phase of a search or research engagement for us, everything we’ve covered so far has been just kind of the first part, a set of meta decisions about what to think about before you even start searching for experts. We also covered all these criteria for finding potential candidates. We haven’t even gotten around to the topic of reaching out to them, which is the most time consuming part of all. Because imagine we typically find at least 20 candidates when researching potential experts. We’ll usually find a few from within our own internal database, the one we’ve been collecting for 30 years. But we always do this kind of thorough and rigorous extra research methodology that I was describing. So typically we cook up a couple of dozen potential candidates, and that’s really the beginning of the process because then it’s another potentially 10 to 40 hours that lawyers really just don’t have, but we do where you got to call ’em all up.

And we do like to do a first round of vetting, Dave, especially if we have the client’s permission. And we even go through the whole process of coming up with a script that will kind of describe to experts about the matter and some of its nuances and we’re ever mindful of discovery considerations and confidentiality. So it’s kind of really an art form to this. You need seasoned jds and people with advanced degrees like we have on our team. You don’t want to let led a very recent college graduate with no experience, do these vetting calls with expert witnesses for your very significant dispute. And yes, this is kind of the heart of the work that we do. We first of all call each of the candidates, and half the time Dave, the experts know us and frankly love us because we’ve possibly paid them a lot of money over the decades.

And so a lot of experts answer the phone on the first ring when we call, but other experts have never been called before. And normally a perfect expert for a tech matter who’s maybe working in a basement lab somewhere wouldn’t normally even answer a phone call in which there’s a law firm on the caller id. And so sometimes it’s better to have a third party reach out to potential candidates where we can kind of describe the matter. And we’ve been in the business of finding cool expert engagements for PhDs like you or experts like you for decades. And we’re able to really express to the potential expert the nuances of the case or at least kind of the high level case facts. And we’re able to save the client a lot of time by conducting sort of a conflicts check and really having an on the dot conversation about whether the expert thinks they’re qualified and fully credentialed for the matter.

And we even go as far as trying to negotiate a fair and reasonable billing rate with the expert on behalf of our clients. A lot of times if an expert sees a kind of famous and feared law firm on their color id, sometimes they see dollar signs and they’re like, yeah, I’ll be your expert at $1,200 an hour. But when we call an expert, they’re kind of mindful that they’re aware that we’re also calling every single one of their peers and we put a little bit of downward pressure on that price and whatever sort of billing rate they express, we often maybe even Fein shock and ask if they do it for a bit less for our good clients. And that brings us to our billing model. We actually don’t charge anything to come alongside a client, especially a Litigation section member, and just be a resource and add this kind of extra level of thoroughness and rigor.

There’s no upfront cost. And as I was saying, when we’re talking to candidates, we ask them their billing rate, we try to negotiate it a bit, and we’ll also often ask them if they would share a portion of their billing rate with us. And sometimes they say yes, sometimes they say no. If they say no, we need to add a modest markup to their billing rate, and that’s how we’re compensated. If and only if all this work we’re kind describing together, Dave actually leads to a retention of an expert. If and only if we here at Roundtable Group found you the most perfect expert that you couldn’t otherwise find using your own methods, only then are we compensated. And even that is just like a percentage of the expert’s billing rate.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Got it. Tell us a little bit about the future of the expert witness industry. What do you see in terms of, I mean obviously the databases that you talked about or the search mechanisms weren’t available when you began the company, so that technology has changed, I’m sure, the landscape of expert witness searches. What else do you see in terms of changes maybe in the next 10 to 20 years in terms of the expert witness industry?

Russ Rosenzweig:

Well, one change certainly different from our first decade of operations is we have a lot of, so-called competitors now for our first decade, it was really fun because when we would introduce ourselves to litigators and describe what we do like a hundred percent of the time, the answer was, wow, I’ve never heard of that. Does anyone else do that? And it was like, no, not really. We kind of accidentally launched a whole new industry, but then what happened is there was competitive entry, partly because we were very blessed to get a lot of press in those early years. We were in the Wall Street Journal, Stanford wrote a business case about us. I think we were so honored to make the famous Inc 500, 5,000 lists, like five or six times. So that led to this competitive entry, which turned out to be the best thing in the world for us because then rather than having to explain this kind of novel, new concept of an expert witness referral company, every time lawyers got to realize, wow, there’s a bunch of firms, companies that do this.

We should outsource this since it’s seemingly a whole industry now and not just do it ourselves Using those sort of inefficient, antiquated ways these days, the competitive landscape makes it very challenging for us because there’s so many expert companies now and it’s not that hard to sort of call yourself an expert witness search firm. So you just got to be mindful. You want to pick one where you have very experienced people, jds engineers, us PTO, former examiners who you feel comfortable sharing these highly confidential and nuanced case facts. Doing this expert witness search, you also want to be mindful that the search firm you hire doesn’t charge too much. Just be careful of some expert witness. Companies are just like, ask an expert what they charge and whatever that number is, they’ll double it. And that’s the billing rate. So one change I’ve seen is just related to that competitive entry.

Got it. Another change I’ve seen, Dave, is there’s just so much more great technology available. Just like when we got started, there were no websites, there were no emails or texts. Cell phones barely fit in your pocket. There were no affordable databases until I think that very year we got founded was the year that Microsoft Access came out, which is what we used to build our initial database. Google didn’t exist, social media didn’t exist. All those things are now really great tools to help find experts, but it’s just like it’s overwhelming to use them all. It’s just really information overload and just no one has time to use the full array of technologies. And some of the most cutting edge technologies like Chat, GPT, everybody talks about, well every week we go there and ask it to find expert witnesses for us for one of our searches. And every week it says, I’m sorry, we’re not able to find experts on this platform, use these other methods instead, which are the very ones we covered earlier in the call. So I think competitive landscape technology, which allows for very rigorous expert witness searches, but just makes it so time consuming for lawyers to handle it. Those are some things that come top of mind about how I think the industry has been changing and shifting.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Excellent. Well, Russ, we are coming to the end of our time together and would love to have you give any last thoughts that you might have to our audience today.

Russ Rosenzweig:

Maybe I’ll just kind of conclude with one other trend that I’ve been noticing, which is first, there are a lot more litigations than there were 30 years ago. In the US there’s just more and more matters. Second is increasingly the expert witness can make the difference. Even the New York Times wrote an article about that very topic, more and more experts make the difference in a Litigation. Just the importance of that thoroughness and rigor in finding experts is so critical. And the third trend is just admissibility of expert reports is so complicated now. I mean, there was just even further changes to the Daubert standard in December of 2023. And the states handle it differently and courts handle it differently. And just being mindful early on in thinking through not just what the perfect expert looks like in terms of criteria, but even thinking about admissibility of their work product discovery considerations. And it’s just like so much goes into really being masterful with expert witness search and referral. And those kinds of tasks have been our sort of passionate line of work for three decades, and we’re just even more excited to get up in the morning and go to work these days than we were 30 years ago back in the dorm room.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Absolutely. And for folks who are listening to this podcast and wanted to reach out to you or to learn more about Roundtable Group, how would they go about doing that?

Russ Rosenzweig:

I love working with Litigation section members. Even personally, I welcome members to call me up, maybe shoot me an email first. It’s just Russ r [email protected], and we can schedule a call or work on a matter together. That would certainly be a privilege to work with more and more section members on matters, and I’m pretty actively involved with the section and on committees myself and going to all the fun events, so I’m very honored to be a part of the family.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Absolutely. Well, Russ Rosenzweig, CEO of Roundtable Group, thank you so much for being on the show today. Thank you so

Speaker 3:

Much, Dave.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Thanks to Litigation section, premier sponsor Roundtable group for sponsoring this podcast. Roundtable Group is an expert witness search and referral service with decades of experience and a comprehensive array of academic and industry relationships, as well as access to proprietary tools that further enhance the expert search capabilities of attorneys with no upfront fees. You only pay if you retain an expert referred by Roundtable Group. Learn [email protected]. And now it’s time for our quick tip from the ABA Litigation section’s Mental Health and Wellness task force. And I’d like to welcome back Charlotte Stevens to the podcast. Charlotte is a lawyer and business consultant who provides workplace training, independent investigations, strategic human resources, consulting and mediation and conflict resolution. She previously practiced law in New Hampshire and Massachusetts for more than 37 years and spent the majority of her career at McLean Middleton, a regional law firm with more than 100 lawyers where she chaired the employment practice group and also represented schools and healthcare practices. Welcome back to the show, Charla.

Speaker 3:

Thank you so much, Dave. I’m excited to talk about something new that I have learned over the past couple of weeks. It’s a concept called Mental Health First aid, which I think could be of a lot of value to individuals and to legal employers. Mental health First aiders as they’re called, get taught to recognize when someone is experiencing a mental health or substance use crisis, and potentially we are there to provide needed support and resources. It’s kind of an extension of traditional first aid training to mental health. And the concept originated in Australia and has been in the United States since 2008. And since then millions of people have been trained Mental Health. First Aiders are trained not only to recognize signs of mental distress, but to respond quickly and compassionately. Studies have shown that the program can be effective in reducing the stigma around mental illness, which is a huge issue in the legal profession as you know, and increasing knowledge and understanding of mental health issues.

By teaching the participants to use a five-step action plan, which is known as A-L-G-E-E, the algae action plan is to approach, assist and assess people with any crisis including the risk of suicide, trauma, high anxiety, listening, non-judgmentally, giving reassurance support and information, encouraging a person to seek appropriate professional help and encouraging a person to seek self-help and other support strategies. Mental health first aiders are not therapists, we’re not even peer support. We’re simply colleagues and friends who can recognize and assist participates in the program come from all walks of life. In the cohort in which I studied recently, there were human resource professionals, a pastor, employees of homeless shelters and local libraries, social workers and community volunteers. Really, we like to think of mental health first, aiders as the first line of support in averting a crisis. Legal employers for sure usually struggle with how to have conversations with individuals showing signs of substance abuse, mental health issues, and burnout.

Even when the conversation starts, it’s often difficult to gain the trust of a coworker or subordinate so that they’ll feel comfortable sharing what could be labeled as a weakness or even a disability, especially in a high stress competitive environment like a law firm. It’s also really easy to accept a response like I’m fine, and move on without the comfort level to pursue the matter further and really get into the issue with the individual. The primary goal of Mental Health First Aid is to be present, actively listen without judgment and get the individual to proper resources. Law firms, courts and other legal employers could definitely benefit from having a first aider or two in the house and to rely on those individuals to have the first compassionate conversation with somebody who might need support. Lawyers and paralegals could also use this training when dealing with clients who’ve experienced trauma. Further information about mental Health First Aid can be found at www.mentalhealthfirstaid.org. And I have to say I really enjoyed and learned a lot from the course and look forward to putting some of that training to use.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Well, excellent. Thanks so much for bringing this to our attention, something that definitely is new to me. So thanks again for being on the show today.

Speaker 3:

My pleasure.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Well, that’s all we have for our show today, and I’d love to hear your thoughts about today’s episode. If you have comments or a question you’d like for me to answer on an upcoming show, you can contact me at [email protected] and connect with me on social. I’m Ad Attorney Dsy on LinkedIn, Instagram X and Facebook. You can also connect with the ABA Litigation section on those platforms as well. But as much as I’d like to connect with you online, nothing beats meeting you in person at one of our next Litigation section events. So please make plans to join us at the 2024 insurance coverage Litigation Committee, CLE seminar in Tucson, taking place March 6th through the ninth. Join us to learn about the very latest developments in insurance law from leading lawyers and insurance professionals, as well as valuable networking events and a variety of outdoor activities that only Tucson can offer.

This year’s meeting will feature the same high quality programming that has attracted insurance practitioners from all over the United States and other parts of the globe for over 30 years. To find out more and for registration information, go to ambar.org/ Litigation insurance. If you like the show, please help spread the word by sharing a link to this episode with a friend or through a post on social and invite others to join the show and community. If you want to leave a review over at Apple Podcasts, it’s incredibly helpful. Even a quick writing at Spotify is super helpful as well. And finally, on the quickly, thanks some folks who make the show possible. Thanks, Tom Mighell obs, who’s on staff with the Litigation section. Thanks. Also goes out to the co-chairs of the Litigation Section’s audio content committee. Haley Maple and Tyler, true thank you to the audio professionals from Legal Talk Network. And last but not least, thank you so much for listening. I’ll see you next time.

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