Week Five:
Christensen & Ehret, LLP

July 16, 2015

Recruiting expert witnesses is difficult. You have to create a pool of reasonable and competent experts. Then you have to narrow down this rather broad list by several relevant factors (location, cost, conflicts of interest, etc). Luckily, being in the great city of Chicago there are several very good schools within the city and surrounding areas including, UChicago, Northwestern, UIC, Loyola, Lake Forest, and DePaul just to name a few. The size and reputations of these schools allow for a rather wide array of professors, researchers, and doctors available across a myriad of disciplines.

For this specific case that I am working on, I looked strictly within the city of Chicago. I called academics from Northwestern, University of Chicago, and Rush Medical due to their close proximity. Nonetheless, I was struck down multiple times as many academics charge anywhere from $125-$275 for mere telephone consultations. As I am not an attorney here at Christensen & Ehret, and simply do not have an extra $300 to use on an expert consultation, I was jumping on the phone with multiple academics a day. After striking out multiple times, I finally found a professor that would listen to our case for free and he offered his opinions on what my next step was, which ultimately led my in the current direction that I am going in.

This of course wasn’t the only task I had during the week. I got to attend two depositions with two different attorneys. Like I said in a previous entry, depositions are truly becoming my favorite out-of-office activity, and I’ve been trying to attend as many as possible. One thing that I love about these is the fact I get to see how each lawyer puts their own spin on their questioning. There are certain things that each lawyer does similarly such as objections or informing the deponent of how the deposition will be conducted, but once questioning begins you can clearly see a lawyer’s true colors.

On top of this, I also got to sit in on my second phone conference/interview with an eye witness to one of our cases. I have been pretty involved in this case since I arrived at Christensen & Ehret, and it has been the most interesting case, in my opinion, because it revolves around criminal activity. Nevertheless, this second phone interview with an eye witness really illuminated some of the solidifying foundation for occurrences at the incident. Antithetically, there were a few things that our witness relayed that differed from previous testimonies from other eye witnesses. This is where the lawyer’s job really comes in as he/she must piece together the given facts of the case and determine what seems more logical. I have been included in this gathering and arranging of facts which has been a pretty rewarding experience.

It has been a pretty full schedule during Week Five, so I think next week could be a little bit of a catch-up week.