Courtroom Insight was originally designed to as a Yelp-type directory to enable litigators to locate and share insights about expert witnesses. In a recent interview co-founder Mark Torchiana explained that since the launch in 2010 he has learned that lawyers do not want to share their comments about experts in a public forum. Courtroom Insights has evolved into the dominant internal expert witness knowledge management solution for law firms.
That transitional pivot occurred when the Scott Rechtschaffen, The Chief Knowledge Officer at the Littler firm contacted Torchiana and asked if the product could be used to manage internal information about arbitrators. After eight years the company has become totally focused on private installations in law firms and content has expanded to include profiles of experts, arbitrators and judges. They recently upgraded the platform search engine.
According to Torchiana, the company is now focused on enhancing the profiles with material from commercial legal publishers though content integration alliances. The goal is to allow researchers to leverage all of the expert witness content which a law firm subscribes to though the single Courtroom Insight platform. A recent alliance with the Daubert Tracker has enabled them to load 120,000 expert witness challenges into Courtroom Insight. They are currently in discussions with six other companies to integrate content based on existing law firm already subscriptions. These new content integrations and a new Courtroom Insight dashboard pictured below will be rolled out in the summer of 2018.
Knowledge management professionals and librarians are the key drivers of development and adoption because they understand that expert witness research involves research across multiple databases. Courtroom Insight is being designed to streamline workflow by enabling these internal and external knowledge intersections. Third party content will be mapped to the experts inside the CI directory.
Have it Your Way Courtroom Insight customization can include identifying the firms expert retentions and then linking that history to profiles and internal documents such as retention letters, testimony, resumes etc.. Most importantly lawyers can share ratings or comments within their organization. Although Courtroom Insights still makes profiles of experts, arbitrators and judges available to the public CI has transitioned into a private knowledge management platform. Torchiana says that CI will provide the firm content in any format the firm wants, such as delivering feeds or populating a firm’s intranet portal.
AI solutions in the Future. Courtroom Insight has entered a partnership with Fastcase to explore applications using the Fastcase AI sandbox. At some point in the next year or two they hope to embed a AI technology in the product.
The White Paper on Improving Expert Witness Workflow
Torchiana is planning to produce a “white paper” on improving expert witness workflow Participate in a related survey at this link. White paper results will be sent to all survey respondents.