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Sharing Courtroom Insight and Legal Relays for Professional Success
Debra Bogaards, a personal injury, elder abuse and brain injury trial attorney with six-attorney Pave & Bogaards, LLP, in San Francisco, once used an electrical engineer who, while quite skillful, waited to perform a critical test until it was too late to be useful at trial. She wished she were aware of his propensity for delays earlier in the lifecycle of her case.
Other lawyers who use this expert will now have that advantage thanks to her review of his background on Courtroom Insight, a new Web-based directory designed to help lawyers identify and evaluate expert witnesses, litigation consultants, arbitrators and mediators through profiles of these providers and reviews of their performance.
Free Reviews
Courtroom Insight is part of a trend in offering law-related user-generated reviews designed to improve the practice. While it focuses on individual performance, Legal Relay is a similar tool for legal technology product reviews.
CourtroomInsight.com and LegalRelay.com both launched at LegalTech New York in February. They are growing by encouraging users, as well as experts and vendors who can benefit from the reviews, to take advantage of their respective “freemium” models. The unrelated sites allow visitors to post and read reviews for free, but offer enhanced positioning and descriptive information to paid subscribers.
Pave & Bogaards, for example, is a prototype tester of an application for in-house counsel, law firms, and insurance companies that combines the knowledge base of all users within a particular organization. “One of the advantages of Courtroom Insight is that lawyers tend to spread information about experts by word of mouth and believe the opinions of their peers about how they performed at trial,” says Bogaards, the firm's managing partner.
That deference to the views of others inspired Mark Torchiana and Everett Harry to launch the site. The San Francisco-based partners with Harry Torchiana LLP have served as forensic accounting expert witnesses for over a decade and were dissatisfied with the system used to locate and evaluate experts. Based on discussions with seasoned litigators, the duo realized that attorneys require better information on the professionals who directly impact their cases.
Similarly, Houston-based John Gilman, an insurance defense litigator in the early 1980s, who quickly realized his passion for technology in positions with IDEX, Inc. (which LexisNexis acquired in 2008) and DataCert, launched LegalRelay.com to positively influence how individuals and organizations purchase legal technology tools.
Today, LegalRelay.com purportedly features 500 product listings from 200 vendors. Its community of reviewers have posted almost 100 reviews, each rated 1-5 and including a paragraph of commentary, since its launch. “We are clearly starting to have an impact and affect how people are making buying decisions,” says Gilman. “Shoppers are starting to exclude products where they expect to see reviews and do not while others are considering products that they might otherwise have rejected out of hand because they were unaware of or had preconceived notions about them.”
For George Morningstar, the collaboration with Legal Relay is an attempt to modernize his organization's marketing. “We are trying to shoot for more Web presence and downplay our print ads to some degree,” he says. Morningstar Technology has been in the legal technology industry since 1983, when it developed trust accounting software for its first attorney client in South Carolina. Since then, it has developed a national client base of lawyers and law firms that use CaseLode, its suite of legal office software that integrates case management and accounting tasks.
Vendors like Morningstar can pay a fee depending on their size, beginning at $750/year, to create a profile on Legal Relay. “We are seeing that when people are searching for financial software, they find this company,” Gilman says. Courtroom Insight charges $349/year for a premium profile, but is currently offering a 50% discount to generate awareness.
Early Results Are Good
Given that both sites are only a few months old, the results are unclear. “I am not sure what the success rate is going to be at this point,” admits Morningstar. That said: “Our clients have put some great testimonials on the site and I think the fact that they are available from an independent third party holds a lot of weight.”
Randall Lehner is a partner with Ulmer & Berne, LLP in Chicago, who uses Courtroom Insight to read and write reviews of experts. “It has been a good resource to find arbitrators or other experts,” he says. “It also creates a single repository database of your firm's institutional knowledge,” he adds.
Craig Enos, forensic accounting expert witness and a Partner with Ueltzen & Company, LLP, in Sacramento, CA, who advises on lost profits of a business, fraud investigations and special accounting, among other issues, has a premium profile on Courtroom Insight. “It is another way to try to get in front of attorneys for whom I would serve as an expert witness,” he says. “I'm hoping that an attorney will search for experts in Sacramento and find me over a non-subscriber.”
While the reviews are generally anonymous, those interested in posting commentary on both sites must register, which gives the companies some level of verification control. “If a product does not receive a great review, it stays there unless we cannot authenticate the reviewer,” says Gilman.
“I believe you should stand by what you're saying,” Bogaards says, admitting that some of her reviews have highlighted positive and “less positive” aspects of an expert's performance. Courtroom Insight encourages reviewers to provide concrete examples to support their claims. In terms of the time commitment, “it takes a few minutes and it is kind of fun,” she advises.
As a trial attorney for 30 years, lawyers would contact Bogaards after seeing her name in the California Jury Verdict Reporter and ask for her opinion on a particular expert. Courtroom Insight streamlines that process. “Expert reviews are an area that has been the least developed in terms of feedback knowledge,” Lehner says. “Ultimately, the utility of Courtroom Insight will be when there is a large volume of users who post reviews,” Bogaards adds.
Torchiana agrees. “We feel like we have built this fantastic platform, and are now focused on building our network of users to achieve that critical mass where our message spreads virally.”
This article first appeared in LJN's Legal Tech Newsletter, a sister publication of this newsletter.
Ari Kaplan is the author of The Opportunity Maker: Strategies for Inspiring Your Legal Career Through Creative Networking and Business Development (Thomson-West 2008). Kaplan was the keynote speaker at the 2010 ABA Techshow and writes about the legal industry and prepares white papers, case studies, client alerts and industry research. For more information please visit AriKaplanAdvisors.com.
Debra Bogaards, a personal injury, elder abuse and brain injury trial attorney with six-attorney Pave & Bogaards, LLP, in San Francisco, once used an electrical engineer who, while quite skillful, waited to perform a critical test until it was too late to be useful at trial. She wished she were aware of his propensity for delays earlier in the lifecycle of her case.
Other lawyers who use this expert will now have that advantage thanks to her review of his background on Courtroom Insight, a new Web-based directory designed to help lawyers identify and evaluate expert witnesses, litigation consultants, arbitrators and mediators through profiles of these providers and reviews of their performance.
Free Reviews
Courtroom Insight is part of a trend in offering law-related user-generated reviews designed to improve the practice. While it focuses on individual performance, Legal Relay is a similar tool for legal technology product reviews.
CourtroomInsight.com and LegalRelay.com both launched at LegalTech
Pave & Bogaards, for example, is a prototype tester of an application for in-house counsel, law firms, and insurance companies that combines the knowledge base of all users within a particular organization. “One of the advantages of Courtroom Insight is that lawyers tend to spread information about experts by word of mouth and believe the opinions of their peers about how they performed at trial,” says Bogaards, the firm's managing partner.
That deference to the views of others inspired Mark Torchiana and Everett Harry to launch the site. The San Francisco-based partners with Harry Torchiana LLP have served as forensic accounting expert witnesses for over a decade and were dissatisfied with the system used to locate and evaluate experts. Based on discussions with seasoned litigators, the duo realized that attorneys require better information on the professionals who directly impact their cases.
Similarly, Houston-based John Gilman, an insurance defense litigator in the early 1980s, who quickly realized his passion for technology in positions with IDEX, Inc. (which
Today, LegalRelay.com purportedly features 500 product listings from 200 vendors. Its community of reviewers have posted almost 100 reviews, each rated 1-5 and including a paragraph of commentary, since its launch. “We are clearly starting to have an impact and affect how people are making buying decisions,” says Gilman. “Shoppers are starting to exclude products where they expect to see reviews and do not while others are considering products that they might otherwise have rejected out of hand because they were unaware of or had preconceived notions about them.”
For George Morningstar, the collaboration with Legal Relay is an attempt to modernize his organization's marketing. “We are trying to shoot for more Web presence and downplay our print ads to some degree,” he says. Morningstar Technology has been in the legal technology industry since 1983, when it developed trust accounting software for its first attorney client in South Carolina. Since then, it has developed a national client base of lawyers and law firms that use CaseLode, its suite of legal office software that integrates case management and accounting tasks.
Vendors like Morningstar can pay a fee depending on their size, beginning at $750/year, to create a profile on Legal Relay. “We are seeing that when people are searching for financial software, they find this company,” Gilman says. Courtroom Insight charges $349/year for a premium profile, but is currently offering a 50% discount to generate awareness.
Early Results Are Good
Given that both sites are only a few months old, the results are unclear. “I am not sure what the success rate is going to be at this point,” admits Morningstar. That said: “Our clients have put some great testimonials on the site and I think the fact that they are available from an independent third party holds a lot of weight.”
Randall Lehner is a partner with
Craig Enos, forensic accounting expert witness and a Partner with Ueltzen & Company, LLP, in Sacramento, CA, who advises on lost profits of a business, fraud investigations and special accounting, among other issues, has a premium profile on Courtroom Insight. “It is another way to try to get in front of attorneys for whom I would serve as an expert witness,” he says. “I'm hoping that an attorney will search for experts in Sacramento and find me over a non-subscriber.”
While the reviews are generally anonymous, those interested in posting commentary on both sites must register, which gives the companies some level of verification control. “If a product does not receive a great review, it stays there unless we cannot authenticate the reviewer,” says Gilman.
“I believe you should stand by what you're saying,” Bogaards says, admitting that some of her reviews have highlighted positive and “less positive” aspects of an expert's performance. Courtroom Insight encourages reviewers to provide concrete examples to support their claims. In terms of the time commitment, “it takes a few minutes and it is kind of fun,” she advises.
As a trial attorney for 30 years, lawyers would contact Bogaards after seeing her name in the California Jury Verdict Reporter and ask for her opinion on a particular expert. Courtroom Insight streamlines that process. “Expert reviews are an area that has been the least developed in terms of feedback knowledge,” Lehner says. “Ultimately, the utility of Courtroom Insight will be when there is a large volume of users who post reviews,” Bogaards adds.
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