Engaging Experts
After 25 years helping litigators find the right expert witnesses, Round Table Group’s network contains some of the world’s greatest experts. On this podcast, we talk to some of them about what’s new in their field of study and their experience as expert witnesses.
Engaging Experts
Engaging with Women's and Gender Studies Expert, Professor Anna Kirkland
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In this episode…
Our guest, Professor Anna Kirkland, is the Kim Lane Scheppele Collegiate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. She is a published author with research focusing on the relationship between health and law, health insurance coverage for infertility, and the politics of health. Professor Kirkland holds a JD and a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy.
Writing expert reports is distinct from academic writing, according to Professor Kirkland. While scholarly journals assume an audience is familiar with the topic, expert witness reports must be clear, concise, and free from jargon.
Check out the entire episode for our discussion on depositions vs. peer review, the meaning of expertise, and the boundaries of your niche.
Introduction to Professor Anna Kirkland
Speaker 1This episode is brought to you by Roundtable Group , the experts on experts .
Speaker 2We've been connecting attorneys with experts for over 30 years .
Speaker 1Find out more at roundtablegroupcom .
Speaker 2Welcome to Engaging Experts . I'm your host , Noah Balmer , and today I'm excited to welcome Professor Anna Kirkland to the show . Professor Kirkland is the Kim Lane Shepley Collegiate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan . She is a published author and her research focuses on the relationship between health and law , health insurance coverage for infertility and the politics of health . Professor Kirkland holds a JD and a PhD in jurisprudence and social policy from UC Berkeley . Professor Kirkland , thank you so much for joining me here today on Engaging Experts .
Speaker 1Thanks so much for having me .
Speaker 2Of course , let's jump into it . So you've made a career in academia for gosh over 20 years . Tell me about your recent involvement in expert witnessing . How did you get there ?
Speaker 1Well , I've only been an expert witness twice , separated in time by a number of years and on totally different topics .
Speaker 1So I was really a newbie kind of both times for different reasons , and I'm not totally sure how anyone found me , although the first time some years ago , it seemed like they wanted a Michigan expert to talk about the Michigan same-sex marriage litigation . There were some elements of that that they wanted an expert for , and so I think you know going to the state flagship was . You know they were looking for somebody a little more local and that I was new was not an impediment , and in the second case I happened to have some original research that was really relevant in the area research and data that's kind of tricky to get , so I could see that I was really the person that had this research that they needed .
Speaker 2So I don't know about you , but when I went to law school we learned about expert witnesses kind of academically , but not what it's like to be one . So how did your education match your experience ?
Speaker 1Well , yeah , I mean , of course I'm interested in the topic of expertise as a researcher . You know who gets to be an expert , what ?
Speaker 1that looks like how you know , and so then , to be in this position was really fascinating and you know , and somewhat intimidating because , as we can explore , it's pretty different types of expertise that you know from what you develop in academia and then what it is being a witness , and so , yeah , it was a multi-layered experience . You know you're trying to be a thing that you've also reflected on and critiqued and you know . And then there's the you know , what did I write 10
Defining Academic Expertise
Speaker 1years ago that might come back , so there's a lot to process .
Speaker 2So , as an academic , tell me what it means to you to be an expert .
Speaker 1I mean in academia , the main way we think about that is you have produced original research in an area that is pretty finely focused . Like when we think about our own expertise , we're really getting in the weeds . You know , am I one of the top people in this particular area , which to anyone else would sound like a very , very small little area , you know . So we think of ourselves , we think of our expertise as fairly narrowly focused and really around . You know what research did we ourselves do and produce and touch , and you know .
Speaker 1But you know , for expert witnessing , one thing I learned was that my expertise was much broader than that . You know that it included . You know , things that I would feel comfortable lecturing about to undergraduates and teaching about , and you know , and lots of times we're reading and teaching about . You know , just the secondary literature that we know very well , but we don't think of that as my expertise . You know . That's just . Oh , I just know about what the conclusions are in this field and a lot of us know about the research conclusions in multiple fields that we don't consider ourselves , you know , to be experts in , but you know that was a big thing . That I learned is sort of where the boundaries are drawn of where what your expertise is . It varies by academic field . And then that that seemed really different to the attorneys that I spoke to . They thought I was an expert in a lot more things than I would have claimed to be an expert in , necessarily .
Speaker 2Sure , sure , do you think that it is important for potential expert witnesses to have kind of a well-defined niche ?
Speaker 1Yeah , I thought about that coming into this and I was thinking about , you know , if you're in a very well-defined disciplinary field and you have you know I've been running a lab studying this particular thing for decades . You know , that's great , that's going to be a very clear , precise boundary around that . But I really think just attorneys could think about interdisciplinary scholars as maybe having a kind of range that maybe they would really need . Like in the first case that I worked on , they really needed someone who could talk about , you know , the application of the legal standard of strict scrutiny and how that had evolved and how that matched political outcomes . So like , what sorts of representation and political wins had different groups like African-Americans and women achieved at the time historically , that they got a heightened level of scrutiny applied and equal protection . So it really was an interdisciplinary legal studies question .
Speaker 1I was like , oh yes , you're asking me to talk about political science and what we know from , you know studies of ballot initiative outcomes , and you know at the same time , is it you need me to understand where the law was at a particular time and blend that story up together , and then you know . So I went from thinking like , oh , I'm not sure I'm the right person for this . You know they had had sort of fancier experts in other parts of the national litigation going on and then I thought , well , you need a Michigan person and you need someone who can pull all this together and I was like , okay , actually , I think I , actually I can do this . You know so interdisciplinary scholars , people in you know I'm in women's and gender studies , but there's a lot of different , newer , more interdisciplinary fields where people , if someone is looking for an expert with a bit of range or in something a little bit new , that could be a great place to look .
Speaker 2Now that's . That's really interesting because you are in quite a dynamic field , or at least the political application is quite dynamic right now . How do you stay abreast of everything ? How do you not only be an expert but maintain that expertise in the changing political environment ?
Speaker 1I mean , this
Interdisciplinary Scholars as Expert Witnesses
Speaker 1is something I've really been confronting recently because it's just you know , I feel really pretty overwhelmed at the moment , trying to keep up with things , and you know it does ebb and flow over the years . You know like I just finished a book on health care civil rights , so I've been really focused on that . My book on the vaccine injury compensation court came out in 2016 . So I'm a little bit more behind in that , but now I'm I'm catching up on a lot of research there and trying to , you know , because there are going to be a lot of things that are coming down the pike with that .
Speaker 1So it's it's always a matter of trying to sort of read what's going on . When is what I might be able to bring going to be helpful or necessary ? Is there a bit of a lull in scholarship ? You know , sometimes things are moving a little bit slower and there's an opening . So I try to , you know , be there when I think there's going to be an opening and anticipate that and maybe let another an area of my expertise kind of go a little bit into the background . But then sometimes a reporter will just call me and then I accept the interview , put it off for a few hours and then frantically research it in the meantime .
Speaker 1So it is hard to try to keep up with all of the things that we try to keep up with , and sometimes you just have to prioritize because it's too much .
Speaker 2With a lot of academic expertise . As you say , there's a lot of publication . There's writing books , there's publishing in journals . A lot of that is paywalled and not super easily searchable . So what are the strategies that attorneys somebody with a J to yourself , what are the strategies that attorneys should be doing to locate people in these kind of niche , kind of nebulous fields , when a lot of their work isn't immediately available ?
Speaker 1Oh , that's a great question . Yeah , and it really is a shame that a lot of our work is behind paywalls . If you find a person and you would like their scholarship , anyone can just email us and ask us to send them their copies of our papers , and we will do that . We're not prohibited by our copyright agreements from sharing our own copies with anyone who asks .
Speaker 2Oh interesting , I didn't know that .
Speaker 1Yeah , so we can . I can send the PDF as an individual . You know , if someone wants to read my paper , I could certainly do that . So that's one way . But you have to have found that person already , sure , and then you're sort of in you know faculty Web pages or Google Scholar to the you know , and then you can't really get behind the paywall . You know , and then you can't really get behind the paywall . But you know some people will have personal websites or you can tell enough from the faculty website . Conference proceedings , conference bulletins are often published . You know the primary . You know the American Political Science Association will publish their . You know just who gave a talk and what the title of the talk was , and you know sometimes that perusing those could be a good way to find you know , then Google the person and then email the person . But yeah , that's a little tedious .
Speaker 2Let's back up to those first couple of phone calls . How did those go Like ? Walk me through a phone call with an engaging attorney . What are the things that they ask ? How do they vet you and how do you vet them back to decide whether or not it's an engagement that you want to accept ?
Speaker 1You know it started with an email . I guess Would you be interested in this and you know , when it's like , wow , one of the more interesting emails you're going to get , right , it's different and , yeah , I always would want to know what exactly do you want from me . You know , and can I ? Can I give this ? Is this something I can do ? Does my expertise match ? What exactly do you want ?
Speaker 2And you know when do you want it ?
Speaker 1Because I should . We should talk a little bit about the academic scheduling versus attorney scheduling . You know , and it's just the way that sometimes the academic work deadline approaches doesn't match very well with what attorneys need . So , you know , the main conversation
Managing Academic and Legal Schedules
Speaker 1would be about you know , what exactly do you need and can I , can I conceivably do this and am I a good fit for this , and what's your deadline .
Speaker 2Well , yeah , exactly . Well , counselor , you've opened the door to scheduling , so let's talk about scheduling a little bit . What do you do to maintain , obviously , as an academic ? You've got courses , you've got research , you've got publication , you've got a lot of things going on , a lot of plates spinning , and then somebody calls you and says I need . I don't know how many hours it's going to take . It might go to a deposition , it might be settled tomorrow . I don't know how do you handle accepting an engagement and making sure that you have enough time to give that engagement everything that it requires .
Speaker 1Yeah , I mean both times .
Speaker 1This was a significant challenge and when I was thinking about doing this , I was thinking back in my schedule and , realistically , what happened is I just ended up taking vacation time and , you know , working through holidays that had otherwise planned to relax in and just making time in other at night , you know , just forcing the time in my schedule where I , where I had it and and I I was lucky that I had some breaks , because , you know , academics we do have like I had the winter break for one of these , you know , which I might have otherwise spent relaxing , and you know , but in so in academia , the big difference , Well , one difference in our jobs is we're doing a lot of different stuff all the time , but the actual deadlines are not drop dead deadlines , you know .
Speaker 1It's not like we have to turn this into the judge at this time , it's , you know , oh , the journal would like my review on this date , but like anytime two weeks later is also fine , you know . So academics have this very flexible sense like yeah , yeah , yeah , that's the deadline , but there are not that many deadlines for us that are really really monitored as much as attorneys , so we're kind of always managing the ebb and flow but that is something attorneys should be aware of is that sometimes academics have fairly flexible chunks of time , but there are some times where you know we've just gotten 100 papers to grade , or we our book deadline from the publisher is there , or or we're just swamped with other things , so it is harder to manage that .
Speaker 2Absolutely so . You've done an expert witness report . Tell me about how that went . Did the attorney advise you on format or did they give you some kind of a template ?
Speaker 1I didn't get a template . I sort of , you know , they explained what it should look like and then I worked up a draft . And then , you know , they gave some feedback . One of them I've done two and one was looking back on it . They wanted it sort of in numbered paragraphs , like sort of very discreetly written . And then the other one was sort of a report , just that I just wrote it , you know , in my own voice and format sure so um , so yeah how is the writing versus ?
Speaker 2you know , academic writing versus writing an expert report ? Is it any different ?
Speaker 1Yeah , it was writing the report . I was trying to be sort of flatter and more just plainly descriptive , you know nothing , no , nothing fancy , you know . No , no , the tone is very sort of matter of fact , whereas then sometimes in our scholarship , where you know , maybe we are a little polemical or we're making an argument or we're , you know , trying to make it a little more interesting , but I did get the message that that's not what we want here , you know just , you know , go through the presentation of your opinion , but you know one contrast is in our academic work we don't necessarily think of ourselves as first and foremost just giving our opinion right .
Speaker 1We're doing a whole bunch of other things and it's not just , you know , give your opinion to the judge . So it was a little bit flatter , a little bit , with a little bit of the voice
Writing Expert Reports vs Academic Work
Speaker 1taken out .
Speaker 2Sure , sure . Well , it has to be tailored for lay persons right .
Speaker 1Yeah , yeah , and there's , you know nothing . No flowery sentences , no jargon , no , just opinion , straightforward opinions , nothing too inflammatory .
Speaker 2Absolutely so . You have not undergone the deposition process or the trial process . What is your impressions of going to deposition and being questioned for hours on end ? Do you feel that you would be ready should that occur ? Have your engaging attorneys started that preparation for you at all ?
Speaker 1I was deposed once .
Speaker 2Oh , I'm sorry .
Speaker 1Yeah , I did go through a few hours of deposition in the second case that I was a witness for , but it didn't go any further than that .
Speaker 2How did that deposition go ?
Speaker 1I mean it was really interesting . It was a lot . I mean , academics are used to being challenged and having to defend our work . Except it happens in the peer review process , where you send it off in paper and then three months later you get some comments and then you have a few weeks to respond . Right , Everything moves very slowly . It's all in writing , and so you know , having to just answer a whole series of pretty specific questions is not how we roll at all .
Speaker 2Right , right . Well , it's different . How does that process compare with , say , the peer review process ?
Speaker 1I mean in the peer review process , where often the person is you know , accepts our account of things and has a bunch of questions , has some doubts . Sometimes peer review can be very aggressive and very unpleasant but , generally , it's not Generally .
Speaker 1they're saying well , I would really like to see more discussion of this right . You know you're trying to figure out how to please them and work with what the peer reviewer wants without making your paper seem in the end too weird or , you know , having too many voices in it or something like that . But at its best it's very collaborative . It's not necessarily adversarial and it's not sort of point by point .
Speaker 2Oh , that's interesting , it's not necessarily adversarial and it's not sort of point by point oh that's interesting .
Speaker 1What helped me in the deposition was just to keep focused on the report , you know , narrow the focus to the exact conclusions and observations and data that I had presented in the report and I knew that we had done a good job in our study and our research and I knew that I knew that data better than anyone and , you know , just trying to keep it , keep it focused in that . Um , now the the opposing attorney , who was very good , did , you know , pull out a sentence from one of my papers that I had published 10 years ago . Um , you know , dr kirkland , do you stand by this sentence ? And I was like , well , let me pause , let's look it up , let's see what did you find . And the attorneys had coached me just to not to respond quickly , to consult the report or think through , and that's what I did . I went back and , well , let me take a minute and look it up , let me make sure I know exactly what you're referring to . And it was fine .
Speaker 2Yeah . I wasn't expecting that impeach you during the peer review process as they would during something like a deposition or a Dobert hearing ? Do they ever try and impeach your credibility as an expert at all ?
Speaker 1Not really , no Okay .
Speaker 2Let's talk about trials . Obviously , you've done deposition . You haven't been in a jury trial and a lot of people haven't , because
Preparing for Depositions and Trials
Speaker 2so many are going to are not getting to the trial process for one reason or another , usually because they go towards settlement . Do you feel that you would be properly prepared for a jury trial ? Have you been given any preparation techniques or anything like that for a jury trial ?
Speaker 1No , and I would definitely need some preparation . One thing I'll say , though , is that undergraduate teaching is a really good way to just have to explain yourself to people year olds every semester and they you know you want to talk about brutal reviews .
Speaker 1Some of those can be can be pretty tough . So people who teach undergraduates , you know , get continual feedback from them about whether you're being clear enough and whether your explanations are good and if you talk too much or not enough or aren't clear enough . So that is one thing with professors , as we have been through the ringer a lot on that , and so I think that is one strength that one might bring is being able to craft an explanation that a jury might be able to understand , because you've had to do it to a bunch of 18 year olds who didn't always do the reading Absolutely , absolutely so , because you have done , to do it to a bunch of 18 year olds who didn't always do the reading Absolutely , absolutely .
Speaker 2So because you have done a deposition , I get to ask you one of my favorite questions , which is do you have any pre deposition or pretrial kind of ritual , something that you do to get yourself ready to go ? I've had people who say I don't need anything , people who say I need a huge breakfast and a nap , and I have . You know , in everything in between I have people who meditate . Is there anything that gets you ready to go into that sort of tense situation ?
Speaker 1Oh gosh , I just drink . I'll tell you , I drank some coffee , banished the family from the basement because this was COVID . You know , I had other people in the house and so I had to just to be able to concentrate . Generally , in COVID , I had set up a whole alternate work station in my basement and so , cause , I was thinking , you know how will I be able to do this in a way that I can focus ? But yeah , I didn't , besides reviewing all my materials and making sure I was adequately caffeinated , which might't know which might not have totally helped .
Speaker 1You know I probably needed to come down rather than up , but absolutely , absolutely .
Speaker 2Before we wrap up , do you have any final advice for academic professionals that are interested in getting into expert witnessing or attorneys who are seeking academic professionals as expert witnesses ?
Speaker 1Oh gosh , I think I've hit some a lot of the main things , which is just to think about your expertise differently . And for attorneys , you know , to coach , to coach professors , knowing that they probably think about their expertise pretty differently than the attorney does and people may have different levels of confidence where they are in the in the academic hierarchy . You know , and going down a little bit in the academic hierarchy will still get you a great expert witness , but that person may not be quite as used to having that bully pulpit , but that may be the person who has the expertise that you need .
Speaker 2Sage advice . Professor Kirkland , thank you so much for joining me here today .
Speaker 1Thanks .
Speaker 2And thank you to our listeners for joining us for another episode of Engaging Experts Cheers .
Speaker 1Thank you for listening to our podcast Engaging Experts . Our show notes are available on our website roundtablegroupcom .