Lecture by John Jurica – Episode 451
In today's presentation, John describes how physicians can create additional income by following his guide to expert witness consulting Part 1.
Expert witness consulting is a long-established side gig for physicians, driven by the frequent filing of malpractice lawsuits. And, although the number of cases filed has remained fairly steady, the size of awards and overall costs have increased during the past two decades. Fees typically range from $300–$600/hour for primary care and $500–$900/hour for specialists, with all time billable.
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Why Expert Witness Work Matters
The work aligns naturally with a physician’s training and experience, particularly in assessing the standard of care, which requires years of active clinical practice. It offers flexibility, as most work involves record review that can be scheduled around clinical duties.
And every billable minute, including phone calls, is compensated at premium hourly rates, often significantly higher than clinical earnings. This allows physicians to diversify income efficiently, building a safety net against job loss or practice disruptions. Additionally, reviewing malpractice cases sharpens clinical skills, improves communication and documentation, and helps physicians avoid their own liability risks.
Common Themes and Key Benefits
At its core, expert witness work is about clear communication and teaching medicine to nonmedical audiences, including attorneys, judges, and juries. Credibility and objectivity matter more than impressive pedigrees. The expert must demonstrate whether the standard of care was met or breached in accessible language.
Cases arrive in waves, often starting slowly before growing, and much of the work has shifted to virtual formats post-COVID. Key benefits include lucrative compensation (frequently double or triple clinical rates when accounting for all hours), intellectual stimulation, schedule flexibility, and income diversification.
Summary
Expert witness consulting represents one of the logical side gigs for actively practicing physicians. It combines high compensation, flexibility, intellectual engagement, and meaningful impact while allowing continued clinical practice and income diversification. For the right physician, this work offers an excellent way to leverage medical expertise beyond the clinical grind.
NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.
Links for Today's Episode:
- Expert Witness Startup School by Dr. Gretchen Green
- Dr. J. Jordan Romano Expert Witness Coaching
- SEAK Resources
- Physician Side Gigs Resources
- Medical Advisors
- MDStaffers
- JurisPro
- Nonclinical Career Academy
- 19 Presentations from the 2023 and 2024 Nonclinical Summits
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The Complete Guide to Expert Witness Consulting for Physicians Part 1
Today, we will attempt to present the complete guide to Expert Witness Consulting for Physicians, and I think it's a little too much for a single episode, so I'm presenting it in two parts for the podcast this week.
We'll call it part one and part two will follow next Tuesday. This will also be available later as a single video. So let's get started. I'll open the slide show right now.
All right, then you should be able to see my screen currently. And again, I'll be talking about the complete guide to Expert Witness Consulting for physicians. Now, we'll start by kind of focusing. I, I've got about, I don't know, I think 18 slides, something like that. And try and be organized about this whole, presentation.
So we'll hit some high points here and then we'll get into the nitty gritty as we get further in. Now, this is an important side gig. It's, it's, it's very flexible. It compliments your clinical practice and it's a proven way to diversify your income. So we're gonna get into those things really quickly.
This one has been around very for a very long time, ever since lawsuits became a common issue for physicians. Malpractice lawsuits, obviously then we needed experts, physician experts to help defend, those physicians who are being sued or to assist the attorneys who are helping the plaintiffs sue the physicians.
And this can leave a, maybe a slightly bad taste in your mouth. We'll talk about which side of the equation you want to be on when you're working in this field. But, it's been around a long time. It's been really. Honed and things have changed in the last few years, particularly as a result of COVID the pandemic.
And so let's just get into it, and I'll go through this now. Each slide is going to have the high points of what I want to talk about. And actually on the next slide I'll show you those particular, main headings. So these are the things we're gonna look at. One is why this work matters. Second thing is some common themes that I've learned over the last eight or nine years, interviewing different physicians doing this as well as an attorney.
We'll talk about the key benefits of the pros and then the challenges or the cons. We'll talk about prerequisites you should have and how to get started. Then how to grow the business, what kind of fees you should charge. And then just some major high points, principles, and the bottom line. So that's the agenda for today.
I think it'll take me at least 45, 50 minutes. And, but we'll cover everything we can, including a lot of resources that you can access to help make your way along this journey. Okay, so the first thing we're gonna talk about is why Expert witness work matters. So first of all, there is a lot of work out there.
We know that physicians are sued on a regular basis. It's not that there's a lot of malpractice because, the majority of lawsuits that start out, at least at some point as being a possibility, end up being, shut down or terminated, what have you or thrown out. But there's always a need for experts at the beginning of the process for sure to decide whether this should proceed or not, and then to defend ourselves when we're on the receiving end.
This is something that naturally fits with your practice, with your education and training. and the best expert witnesses are those that are probably the most capable physicians and the most well-educated and the most experienced physicians because it takes several years to even be eligible to do this kind of work.
You can't do this out of medical school unless you've been in practice, because one of the big things you have to demonstrate or show is not found or not followed is. The, standard of care. So you have to be in practice for a while to know that. And the more experience you get, probably the more you know about that.
The nice thing about this for physicians, is that we don't end up working for free in this field. We know in medical practice that sure, we might have hours scheduled with our patients for 35, 40, 45 hours a week, but if we run our own practice, or even if we work for somebody else, we're probably gonna work at least 50 or 55 or 60 hours a week.
It can vary a lot, but there's a lot of downtime, in an employed situation or even in our own practice. And the thing about doing, expert witness consulting is you bill for every minute that you work, including when you're on the phone. So, turns out that not only do you. Charging, hourly rate that's higher than what you get in practice.
In most cases, there isn't any downtime. if you're reviewing charts, if you're interacting with an attorney or with, a client in other ways, you get the bill for everything. So you have to keep track of that. Obviously, most of this work is done on flexible time because the, beginning part of this work and most of the work, even if you're a very experienced expert witness, is in reviewing records.
Obviously there's other aspects to it. There's consulting with your attorney, maybe, participating in some other activities, which we'll talk about in a minute. But thing is that. If you can carve out 10 or 12 hours a week to begin with, once you actually have some cases to review, then you can do that work at different time.
If you normally are, most, focus in the morning, you might wanna do all your expert witness work in the mornings and then do your clinical work in the afternoons or late morning and afternoons. Or you can carve out a day or you can do a lot of it on the weekend if that's something you wanna do.
So it's flexible and or Implied by what I'm saying, because it's so flexible and because there's no downtime, you can cut back on your clinical time and diversify your income in a much more efficient way. So you could cut back on, let's say one day of clinical, but you can do the equivalent of a day and a half of work, at least financially, because you're going to get paid more and there's no downtime.
The other thing of that is when you become good at this, it becomes a great way to diversify your income. Because then if you lose your clinical income, you'll have something to fall back on. If the only thing that you're doing is your clinical, in your clinical, and that goes away because your clinic fires you, or your hospital closes, or it gets bought out, or for some reason you're let go.
Let's say you're part of a radiology group or an ER group and you lose a contract, well, now you don't have anywhere to work, and that can be a big problem. And if you're already doing expert witness consulting, then you'll have that to support you while you're looking for your next position or opening a new practice or whatever you decide to do.
And if you happen to be 50 50, you could easily cover all your normal expenses with, if you're doing, expert witness work 20, 30 hours a week. Most people don't do that. But if you happen to find yourself in that position and, you lose one of those jobs, then the other one will carry you until you can replace it.
So, and the other thing is, it's so natural to be part of your practice. It actually makes you a better clinician. when you're studying what leads to, a lawsuit like this, a malpractice lawsuit, it makes you a better physician because you learn the things that have caused those accusations.
They're not always really based on the quality. A lot of times they're based on the communication or they're based on misunderstandings or they're based on your attitude and or some err. Comment or not knowing how to communicate with patients well enough. So all those things improve when you become an expert witness consultant.
So it makes perfect sense. In fact, I kind of feel as though, maybe we should all have training as an expert witness while we're still in our residency or fellowship, because doing that will actually make you a better physician, a better communicator, and probably better able to avoid accusations of malpractice in your own practice.
So that's why it really is such a great option for those looking for a side gig. So I'm gonna do some quotes here based on the information that I put together. And so these, each quote in this, in each section, we'll just kind of sum things up, in a way. So experts agree that this is, well, it's not a full-time replacement for most of us, but it's one of the smartest, most logical side gigs for actively practicing physicians.
And that's what the guests on my podcast have told me. and a lot of times they've repeated this same, type of, of sentiment. All right, now let's talk about common themes. what are the thematic things that apply to expert witness consulting? And what is the crux of the business exactly? Well, what you're doing is communicating, teaching medicine.
Teaching others to understand medicine or what happened during the care of a patient, to your attorney, to the judge, to the juries. And so that's what you're doing. You're a communicator and you're an expert, and you're an expert in your own field. And what you're often trying to demonstrate is either that the standard of care was not met, mistakes were made, or even worse than just mistakes, intentional.
Or on the other hand, you're defending that and saying, no, the proper care was given, given the, standard of care was met. And you're just trying to explain that. But you have to be able to explain it in a way they can understand because they won't know the jargon. So what you're doing is you're being that go between, what happened, what's, recorded, what's in the medical record, what other witnesses can tell you about what happened, and explaining that to your attorney that you are consulting for and to the jury, if it gets to that point, what it means and why it demonstrates what you're trying to demonstrate.
Either that there was no malpractice or that yes indeed a mistake was made and then, some level of compensation, will follow. So. The other thing that I've learned when I've talked to people about this, and even my little experience that I had in terms of being deposed on several occasions and, interacting with attorneys that are on the other side as well as my own, is that it's your credibility and objectivity that are more important than any pedigree.
So you just have to show that the standard of care was or was not met. So you need to know the standard of care and everything that goes with that for your specialty. So that's the important thing. So that's the crux of it. And so as long as you're an active physician seeing the typical patients that are involved in the case, then you just, the next step is to be able to communicate that and to demonstrate honesty and integrity and patience and, an ability and a desire to share that information so that the jury or the judge can understand what happened.
The other thing that is very common in this particular. side hustle is that cases come and go in waves, so it starts out slow. Then you can get a little busier, then it can ease up again, and you can get busier again, and then you can get a little overwhelmed. And so it can come in waves because it's hit and miss.
Depending on how many attorneys you've identified, you will be working with the nature of those cases. And so it's somewhat random, but like any business, consulting business or other business things start out slow. But of course you're practicing at this time, so you don't. You're not missing pay, you're not missing the income, but they start out slow and then things tend to start rolling and growing over time.
And it can even reach a point where it becomes somewhat, logarithmic or exponential. So you have to be able to put the brakes on when the, this side of your work is starting to, interfere with the other side of the work. But what most expert witness consultants do, if they like it, is they start slow and then they gradually cut back on their clinical and take on more of the expert witness, activities.
And the other thing that has been noticed recently in the last, three or four years since the pandemic is what used to be done remotely, occasionally, and now has shifted to mostly virtual work. So in the past, depositions were live face to face. Now most, depositions are virtual. And as I'll mention later, that even the appearances in court, so to speak, are remotely done.
And, sometimes I don't think more than half are being done in that way currently, but it is something that has been growing. a theme. And the experts agree that this is teaching work that rewards professionalism, patience, and a willingness to learn legalese. So you need to know the medical side, need to know the legal terms.
Then you need to translate that. And if you can do that, well, if you can do that with, being very calm, being very meticulous, but knowing how to translate that to people that are listening to you, whoever that might be, then you'll be very successful.
Now, why is this such an attractive, thing to do? specifically I'll get into that and, and with this slide, and do I push some of you to do it even though you may not have considered it? because it's something you could almost fall into. in fact, I'll, I'll bring this up. It may come up later, but a lot of people get started in this because an attorney searches them out.
So you might've been involved with a case. When you're involved with a case, you're gonna be involved with one or two, you're gonna get to know one or two attorneys. On the defense. On the defense side of things that happened to me, I, I was sued several times and, for the most part got out scot free.
But during that process, I get to become familiar with my attorneys that were provided by my insurance company. And they were fantastic. And, if you're on the receiving end of a lawsuit, you know this, but they coach you, they explain everything to you. they go through the case in detail. Just as you will have done, you'll go through your records, remind yourself what happened, and then you'll have to talk to your, attorney about the,
The way you're going to approach the defense of this accusation, and if it comes to the time where you need to do a deposition, then you're gonna be coached about the definition, the The deposition and you'll be prepared for that. And you might even go through some practice sessions with your attorney who will, brief you about the kind of questions that will be asked and how you should answer those questions.
And you'll be the expert on the medical side of that. But then the attorney will be your coach about how you answer the questions. They'll basically usually tell you not to volunteer anything. If somebody asks a yes, no question, answer it yes or no unless you feel like it needs an explanation so that people don't misconstrue the answer, but you don't volunteer a lot of information and you become very good at it.
And they're gonna also give you feedback about your demeanor and whether you seem to be losing your patience and that kind of thing. And I. In some ways it would be better if you'd been through that process a few times before going and thinking about becoming an expert witness, because you'll already understand, what to expect.
But anyway, so what happens then is if you are sued and you go through that process, then later on the way you get your first case as a expert witness consultant is that one of those attorneys might say, Hey, I remember working with John and he seemed to have a pretty good demeanor and a pretty good mastery of this particular topic.
Maybe he can be an expert witness for me because I don't really have anyone else, readily available. So. Then you'll find out if that happens or if you decide to pursue this on your own, that the compensation is quite lucrative. And if you're doing the equivalent in primary care as let's say, $150 an hour, $200 an hour, then you'll make double that.
Fairly easily. If you're a specialist, you can often go two to three times your clinical rate if you average that out, especially, well, especially if you just, if you calculate your, your compensation as a physician, including all the extra work that you do when you're not in the office, like whether it's medical records or reviewing things or preparing, for some issue with a lot of research.
And you'll find that you're working a lot of hours without the compensation. And if you add those hours in, your compensation is not really 200, it's more like one 50 or 1 25 an hour. one thing. It's, it's, the compensation is good. the intellectual stimulation variety is good. It's just something different.
And if you're tired of just seeing patient after patient after patient. Every case is different. Everything, kind of might tweak certain things and, and help you remember the care of certain types of conditions and cause you to do research, which you get paid for doing the research and, bringing a little more variety than what your straight practice has done.
I mean, let's face it, if you can be a surgeon, you can be a family doctor, whatever, but there are things that become so routine and so recurrent that not only do you know them like the back of your hand, but they're boring and they're, just irritating sometimes, to have seen your 10th diabetic patient that not following their diet and taking their meds as instructed.
If you happen to be an endocrinologist or even an internist, And you also get better by doing this because you're, you're, you're studying, you're reading up, you're, you're learning, and verifying what you know, intrinsically, what you've been trained to do. But it's good to go back and review.
And if you're going to be quizzed about it, then of course you're gonna know it better than anyone. And so it really improves your clinical practice and documentation. And sometimes I even think that, as I may have mentioned earlier, that, perhaps we should do like a rotation on this topic because it'll make our practice better.
Most of the work that you do in this when you get, especially when you get started, is very flexible. so if there's a certain half day when you're free, or if you have varying. times where you have free time, maybe every two or three weeks you have a day off, or maybe you do a half a day clinic somewhere off campus and then, once a month, but then the other three weeks, that could be free.
There's this flexibility if you just get bored at home and you wanna spend Saturday mornings doing something like this, you can do that when you start doing this, for sure. and again, the income diversification will be, it's like diversifying your, investments, having a diverse, career where you're doing two or three different kinds of things that are built on your clinical background.
Then if one goes away or one is temporarily. reduce, let's say you're a surgeon and you can't do surgery for just a month or two because of an injury or an illness or something. Well, you, if you can do the, expert witness consulting in the meantime and ramp that up, then you can offset some of that loss of income.
And, some people do it because of a, a mission driven aspect of it because they either want to help the justice system. 'cause we know there are some physicians who don't practice as well as they should. I mean, I can list two or three in my area that, really shouldn't be practicing. And it's been difficult to, to get them to slow down, whether it's because of age competency, they just don't care.
And so sometimes you, you do need to help protect patients by assisting in the, the legal process. And then on the other hand, of course, if you feel like, some of your colleagues are being unfairly sued, we, I think, or we've, if we've experienced that, then obviously we can have that kind of,
Feeling for our colleagues that, they need help. And so you don't wanna have to wait forever to get a case settled. And so you'd like to have people who can step up and help take care of your case and help be expert witnesses on your behalf. And so, it's like any nonclinical, people worry about it being like a cop out or something, but it's not.
It's your, it's part of the healthcare system in this country, unfortunately. And I think it should be overhauled. But in the meanwhile, in the meantime, we should, help make the system move as quickly and as smoothly and as fairly as possible. So you can get into that from the standpoint of why you might wanna do this particular career.
So the experts agree this work is intellectually engaging, financially rewarding, and it can be personally fulfilling while still allowing you to practice your full clinical practice. Those are the big benefits.
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The Complete Guide to Expert Witness Consulting for Physicians Part 1
Today, we will attempt to present the complete guide to Expert Witness Consulting for Physicians, and I think it's a little too much for a single episode, so I'm presenting it in two parts for the podcast this week.
We'll call it part one and part two will follow next Tuesday. This will also be available later as a single video. So let's get started. I'll open the slide show right now.
All right, then you should be able to see my screen currently. And again, I'll be talking about the complete guide to Expert Witness Consulting for physicians. Now, we'll start by kind of focusing. I, I've got about, I don't know, I think 18 slides, something like that. And try and be organized about this whole, presentation.
So we'll hit some high points here and then we'll get into the nitty gritty as we get further in. Now, this is an important side gig. It's, it's, it's very flexible. It compliments your clinical practice and it's a proven way to diversify your income. So we're gonna get into those things really quickly.
This one has been around very for a very long time, ever since lawsuits became a common issue for physicians. Malpractice lawsuits, obviously then we needed experts, physician experts to help defend, those physicians who are being sued or to assist the attorneys who are helping the plaintiffs sue the physicians.
And this can leave a, maybe a slightly bad taste in your mouth. We'll talk about which side of the equation you want to be on when you're working in this field. But, it's been around a long time. It's been really. Honed and things have changed in the last few years, particularly as a result of COVID the pandemic.
And so let's just get into it, and I'll go through this now. Each slide is going to have the high points of what I want to talk about. And actually on the next slide I'll show you those particular, main headings. So these are the things we're gonna look at. One is why this work matters. Second thing is some common themes that I've learned over the last eight or nine years, interviewing different physicians doing this as well as an attorney.
We'll talk about the key benefits of the pros and then the challenges or the cons. We'll talk about prerequisites you should have and how to get started. Then how to grow the business, what kind of fees you should charge. And then just some major high points, principles, and the bottom line. So that's the agenda for today.
I think it'll take me at least 45, 50 minutes. And, but we'll cover everything we can, including a lot of resources that you can access to help make your way along this journey. Okay, so the first thing we're gonna talk about is why Expert witness work matters. So first of all, there is a lot of work out there.
We know that physicians are sued on a regular basis. It's not that there's a lot of malpractice because, the majority of lawsuits that start out, at least at some point as being a possibility, end up being, shut down or terminated, what have you or thrown out. But there's always a need for experts at the beginning of the process for sure to decide whether this should proceed or not, and then to defend ourselves when we're on the receiving end.
This is something that naturally fits with your practice, with your education and training. and the best expert witnesses are those that are probably the most capable physicians and the most well-educated and the most experienced physicians because it takes several years to even be eligible to do this kind of work.
You can't do this out of medical school unless you've been in practice, because one of the big things you have to demonstrate or show is not found or not followed is. The, standard of care. So you have to be in practice for a while to know that. And the more experience you get, probably the more you know about that.
The nice thing about this for physicians, is that we don't end up working for free in this field. We know in medical practice that sure, we might have hours scheduled with our patients for 35, 40, 45 hours a week, but if we run our own practice, or even if we work for somebody else, we're probably gonna work at least 50 or 55 or 60 hours a week.
It can vary a lot, but there's a lot of downtime, in an employed situation or even in our own practice. And the thing about doing, expert witness consulting is you bill for every minute that you work, including when you're on the phone. So, turns out that not only do you. Charging, hourly rate that's higher than what you get in practice.
In most cases, there isn't any downtime. if you're reviewing charts, if you're interacting with an attorney or with, a client in other ways, you get the bill for everything. So you have to keep track of that. Obviously, most of this work is done on flexible time because the, beginning part of this work and most of the work, even if you're a very experienced expert witness, is in reviewing records.
Obviously there's other aspects to it. There's consulting with your attorney, maybe, participating in some other activities, which we'll talk about in a minute. But thing is that. If you can carve out 10 or 12 hours a week to begin with, once you actually have some cases to review, then you can do that work at different time.
If you normally are, most, focus in the morning, you might wanna do all your expert witness work in the mornings and then do your clinical work in the afternoons or late morning and afternoons. Or you can carve out a day or you can do a lot of it on the weekend if that's something you wanna do.
So it's flexible and or Implied by what I'm saying, because it's so flexible and because there's no downtime, you can cut back on your clinical time and diversify your income in a much more efficient way. So you could cut back on, let's say one day of clinical, but you can do the equivalent of a day and a half of work, at least financially, because you're going to get paid more and there's no downtime.
The other thing of that is when you become good at this, it becomes a great way to diversify your income. Because then if you lose your clinical income, you'll have something to fall back on. If the only thing that you're doing is your clinical, in your clinical, and that goes away because your clinic fires you, or your hospital closes, or it gets bought out, or for some reason you're let go.
Let's say you're part of a radiology group or an ER group and you lose a contract, well, now you don't have anywhere to work, and that can be a big problem. And if you're already doing expert witness consulting, then you'll have that to support you while you're looking for your next position or opening a new practice or whatever you decide to do.
And if you happen to be 50 50, you could easily cover all your normal expenses with, if you're doing, expert witness work 20, 30 hours a week. Most people don't do that. But if you happen to find yourself in that position and, you lose one of those jobs, then the other one will carry you until you can replace it.
So, and the other thing is, it's so natural to be part of your practice. It actually makes you a better clinician. when you're studying what leads to, a lawsuit like this, a malpractice lawsuit, it makes you a better physician because you learn the things that have caused those accusations.
They're not always really based on the quality. A lot of times they're based on the communication or they're based on misunderstandings or they're based on your attitude and or some err. Comment or not knowing how to communicate with patients well enough. So all those things improve when you become an expert witness consultant.
So it makes perfect sense. In fact, I kind of feel as though, maybe we should all have training as an expert witness while we're still in our residency or fellowship, because doing that will actually make you a better physician, a better communicator, and probably better able to avoid accusations of malpractice in your own practice.
So that's why it really is such a great option for those looking for a side gig. So I'm gonna do some quotes here based on the information that I put together. And so these, each quote in this, in each section, we'll just kind of sum things up, in a way. So experts agree that this is, well, it's not a full-time replacement for most of us, but it's one of the smartest, most logical side gigs for actively practicing physicians.
And that's what the guests on my podcast have told me. and a lot of times they've repeated this same, type of, of sentiment. All right, now let's talk about common themes. what are the thematic things that apply to expert witness consulting? And what is the crux of the business exactly? Well, what you're doing is communicating, teaching medicine.
Teaching others to understand medicine or what happened during the care of a patient, to your attorney, to the judge, to the juries. And so that's what you're doing. You're a communicator and you're an expert, and you're an expert in your own field. And what you're often trying to demonstrate is either that the standard of care was not met, mistakes were made, or even worse than just mistakes, intentional.
Or on the other hand, you're defending that and saying, no, the proper care was given, given the, standard of care was met. And you're just trying to explain that. But you have to be able to explain it in a way they can understand because they won't know the jargon. So what you're doing is you're being that go between, what happened, what's, recorded, what's in the medical record, what other witnesses can tell you about what happened, and explaining that to your attorney that you are consulting for and to the jury, if it gets to that point, what it means and why it demonstrates what you're trying to demonstrate.
Either that there was no malpractice or that yes indeed a mistake was made and then, some level of compensation, will follow. So. The other thing that I've learned when I've talked to people about this, and even my little experience that I had in terms of being deposed on several occasions and, interacting with attorneys that are on the other side as well as my own, is that it's your credibility and objectivity that are more important than any pedigree.
So you just have to show that the standard of care was or was not met. So you need to know the standard of care and everything that goes with that for your specialty. So that's the important thing. So that's the crux of it. And so as long as you're an active physician seeing the typical patients that are involved in the case, then you just, the next step is to be able to communicate that and to demonstrate honesty and integrity and patience and, an ability and a desire to share that information so that the jury or the judge can understand what happened.
The other thing that is very common in this particular. side hustle is that cases come and go in waves, so it starts out slow. Then you can get a little busier, then it can ease up again, and you can get busier again, and then you can get a little overwhelmed. And so it can come in waves because it's hit and miss.
Depending on how many attorneys you've identified, you will be working with the nature of those cases. And so it's somewhat random, but like any business, consulting business or other business things start out slow. But of course you're practicing at this time, so you don't. You're not missing pay, you're not missing the income, but they start out slow and then things tend to start rolling and growing over time.
And it can even reach a point where it becomes somewhat, logarithmic or exponential. So you have to be able to put the brakes on when the, this side of your work is starting to, interfere with the other side of the work. But what most expert witness consultants do, if they like it, is they start slow and then they gradually cut back on their clinical and take on more of the expert witness, activities.
And the other thing that has been noticed recently in the last, three or four years since the pandemic is what used to be done remotely, occasionally, and now has shifted to mostly virtual work. So in the past, depositions were live face to face. Now most, depositions are virtual. And as I'll mention later, that even the appearances in court, so to speak, are remotely done.
And, sometimes I don't think more than half are being done in that way currently, but it is something that has been growing. a theme. And the experts agree that this is teaching work that rewards professionalism, patience, and a willingness to learn legalese. So you need to know the medical side, need to know the legal terms.
Then you need to translate that. And if you can do that, well, if you can do that with, being very calm, being very meticulous, but knowing how to translate that to people that are listening to you, whoever that might be, then you'll be very successful.
Now, why is this such an attractive, thing to do? specifically I'll get into that and, and with this slide, and do I push some of you to do it even though you may not have considered it? because it's something you could almost fall into. in fact, I'll, I'll bring this up. It may come up later, but a lot of people get started in this because an attorney searches them out.
So you might've been involved with a case. When you're involved with a case, you're gonna be involved with one or two, you're gonna get to know one or two attorneys. On the defense. On the defense side of things that happened to me, I, I was sued several times and, for the most part got out scot free.
But during that process, I get to become familiar with my attorneys that were provided by my insurance company. And they were fantastic. And, if you're on the receiving end of a lawsuit, you know this, but they coach you, they explain everything to you. they go through the case in detail. Just as you will have done, you'll go through your records, remind yourself what happened, and then you'll have to talk to your, attorney about the,
The way you're going to approach the defense of this accusation, and if it comes to the time where you need to do a deposition, then you're gonna be coached about the definition, the The deposition and you'll be prepared for that. And you might even go through some practice sessions with your attorney who will, brief you about the kind of questions that will be asked and how you should answer those questions.
And you'll be the expert on the medical side of that. But then the attorney will be your coach about how you answer the questions. They'll basically usually tell you not to volunteer anything. If somebody asks a yes, no question, answer it yes or no unless you feel like it needs an explanation so that people don't misconstrue the answer, but you don't volunteer a lot of information and you become very good at it.
And they're gonna also give you feedback about your demeanor and whether you seem to be losing your patience and that kind of thing. And I. In some ways it would be better if you'd been through that process a few times before going and thinking about becoming an expert witness, because you'll already understand, what to expect.
But anyway, so what happens then is if you are sued and you go through that process, then later on the way you get your first case as a expert witness consultant is that one of those attorneys might say, Hey, I remember working with John and he seemed to have a pretty good demeanor and a pretty good mastery of this particular topic.
Maybe he can be an expert witness for me because I don't really have anyone else, readily available. So. Then you'll find out if that happens or if you decide to pursue this on your own, that the compensation is quite lucrative. And if you're doing the equivalent in primary care as let's say, $150 an hour, $200 an hour, then you'll make double that.
Fairly easily. If you're a specialist, you can often go two to three times your clinical rate if you average that out, especially, well, especially if you just, if you calculate your, your compensation as a physician, including all the extra work that you do when you're not in the office, like whether it's medical records or reviewing things or preparing, for some issue with a lot of research.
And you'll find that you're working a lot of hours without the compensation. And if you add those hours in, your compensation is not really 200, it's more like one 50 or 1 25 an hour. one thing. It's, it's, the compensation is good. the intellectual stimulation variety is good. It's just something different.
And if you're tired of just seeing patient after patient after patient. Every case is different. Everything, kind of might tweak certain things and, and help you remember the care of certain types of conditions and cause you to do research, which you get paid for doing the research and, bringing a little more variety than what your straight practice has done.
I mean, let's face it, if you can be a surgeon, you can be a family doctor, whatever, but there are things that become so routine and so recurrent that not only do you know them like the back of your hand, but they're boring and they're, just irritating sometimes, to have seen your 10th diabetic patient that not following their diet and taking their meds as instructed.
If you happen to be an endocrinologist or even an internist, And you also get better by doing this because you're, you're, you're studying, you're reading up, you're, you're learning, and verifying what you know, intrinsically, what you've been trained to do. But it's good to go back and review.
And if you're going to be quizzed about it, then of course you're gonna know it better than anyone. And so it really improves your clinical practice and documentation. And sometimes I even think that, as I may have mentioned earlier, that, perhaps we should do like a rotation on this topic because it'll make our practice better.
Most of the work that you do in this when you get, especially when you get started, is very flexible. so if there's a certain half day when you're free, or if you have varying. times where you have free time, maybe every two or three weeks you have a day off, or maybe you do a half a day clinic somewhere off campus and then, once a month, but then the other three weeks, that could be free.
There's this flexibility if you just get bored at home and you wanna spend Saturday mornings doing something like this, you can do that when you start doing this, for sure. and again, the income diversification will be, it's like diversifying your, investments, having a diverse, career where you're doing two or three different kinds of things that are built on your clinical background.
Then if one goes away or one is temporarily. reduce, let's say you're a surgeon and you can't do surgery for just a month or two because of an injury or an illness or something. Well, you, if you can do the, expert witness consulting in the meantime and ramp that up, then you can offset some of that loss of income.
And, some people do it because of a, a mission driven aspect of it because they either want to help the justice system. 'cause we know there are some physicians who don't practice as well as they should. I mean, I can list two or three in my area that, really shouldn't be practicing. And it's been difficult to, to get them to slow down, whether it's because of age competency, they just don't care.
And so sometimes you, you do need to help protect patients by assisting in the, the legal process. And then on the other hand, of course, if you feel like, some of your colleagues are being unfairly sued, we, I think, or we've, if we've experienced that, then obviously we can have that kind of,
Feeling for our colleagues that, they need help. And so you don't wanna have to wait forever to get a case settled. And so you'd like to have people who can step up and help take care of your case and help be expert witnesses on your behalf. And so, it's like any nonclinical, people worry about it being like a cop out or something, but it's not.
It's your, it's part of the healthcare system in this country, unfortunately. And I think it should be overhauled. But in the meanwhile, in the meantime, we should, help make the system move as quickly and as smoothly and as fairly as possible. So you can get into that from the standpoint of why you might wanna do this particular career.
So the experts agree this work is intellectually engaging, financially rewarding, and it can be personally fulfilling while still allowing you to practice your full clinical practice. Those are the big benefits.
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