OUR MISSION AND VISION
We support public interest litigation and advocacy through expert consulting.
Public Interest Experts is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit seeking to advance social justice and equity by providing world-class, commercial-level litigation support (including expert witness and case management services) on a pro bono basis to public interest litigators, advocates and other lawyers and policy makers focused on these goals.
In the commercial space, expert witness and case management services are part of an efficient market where parties can afford to pay top dollar for these best-in-class services. In the public interest space, there is less funding and resources than in the commercial space. As a consequence, public interest legal and policy advocates under-utilize the valuable contributions experts can provide.
EXPERTS
What is an expert?
"An expert witness is a person with specialized knowledge, skills, education, or experience in a particular field who is called upon to provide their expertise in legal proceedings to assist the court with understanding complex technical or scientific issues."(Cornell Law School)
An essential quality of an expert witness is the independence of their opinion. While experts are engaged by attorneys, their primary duty is to the integrity of their analysis and the ideas they present, ensuring their testimony remains impartial and unbiased.
In Litigation:
An expert witness brings specialized knowledge to assist the court in understanding complex matters. They may provide testimony on issues ranging from economic damages and forensic accounting to technical or scientific complexities. Once accepted by the court as an Expert Witness, the expert's opinions are considered admissible evidence in the case, playing a crucial role in shaping the outcome of legal proceedings.
In Advocacy:
Experts use their authority to analyze and promote specific ideas of public interest. Through white papers, op-eds, regulatory comments, and speaking engagements at conferences or before legislative bodies, they advocate for policies or concepts that shape public discourse and influence decision-making.
OUR FOUNDING
Filling a Need
By Dr. Coleman Bazelon, Founder
In the Spring of 2022, I attended the ACLU Biannual Conference. We gave a UC San Diego professor, Tom Wong, an award in appreciation for his work as an expert witness in several immigration related litigations filed by the ACLU. As he accepted the award, he started to riff on what it was like to be an expert witness. To much laughter, he talked about the tight deadlines, the funny way you had to write reports for Courts, and the challenges of sticking to the legal mandates. As I watched, and chuckled, I thought to myself – he is describing my day job. Much of my professional life as a consulting economist and Principal at The Brattle Group is serving as an expert witness in litigation. I knew what Professor Wong was making fun of. I also knew it could be better than he described.
Expert support firms specialize in providing the highest possible quality expert witness testimony to litigations. In a typical commercial litigation an expert would assess damages or the market impacts of a merger. These are high stakes litigations with millions or billions of dollars at stake. The experts have to be first rate because the other side is going to throw everything they can at them to undermine their testimony. Depositions and trial testimony are like an oral defense of a thesis, but unlike in a university setting with your advisor grilling you, the opposing lawyers really want you to fail. It is also a very lucrative business for the experts and firms that support them. As a result, there are natural incentives built in to make sure the best experts, with the highest quality support, are engaged.
This contrasts to my experience with pro bono engagements as an expert. When a lead for a pro bono case comes in, it does not receive the same interest and there are no built-in incentives to find the best qualified expert with the highest quality support. For example, I have served as an expert in a voting rights case where we provided analysis and testimony on the disparate impacts of a voter ID law that was well received by the Court. I was qualified by my PhD in Economics and experience serving as an expert, but I had never done a voting rights case or disparate impact analysis before. In other words, if this had been a high stakes commercial case, I would not have been the expert.
Thinking more about that night listening to Professor Wong, it became clear to me that public interest litigation and advocacy did not enjoy the same level of expert support that my commercial clients enjoy. Public Interest Experts was founded to fix that.