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 Linguistics Expert, Professor Stanley Dubinsky
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In this episode…
Today’s guest, Stanley Dubinsky, is the Co-Principal of ConflictAnalytiX, LLC, and Professor of Linguistics at the University of South Carolina. Through analyzing the meaning and structure of texts, he helps guide attorneys through the complexities arising from structured grammar and normative usages of language. Professor Dubinsky holds a PhD in Linguistics from Cornell.
Expert witnesses can fall into the trap of using excessive technical language to appear intelligent, according to Professor Dubinsky. He recommends writing as plainly as possible and reading your expert reports aloud to ensure that the language you write is both precise and understandable.
Check out the full episode for our discussion on giving away too much during initial calls, becoming a virtuoso in your field, and billable rates.
Introduction to Professor Dubinsky
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. Find out more at roundtablegroupcom. Welcome to Engaging Experts. I'm your host, noah Balmer, and today I'm excited to welcome Professor Stanley Dubinsky to the show Now. Professor Dubinsky is the co-principal of Conflict Analytics LLC and a professor of linguistics at the University of South Carolina. Through analyzing meaning and structure of text, he helps guide attorneys through the complexities arising out of structured grammar and normative usages of language. Professor Dubinsky holds a PhD in linguistics from Cornell. Professor Dubinsky, thank you so much for joining me here today.
Speaker 1You're welcome. Yeah, I'm delighted to be on this.
Speaker 2Absolutely, let's jump into it. So you've been in academia for gosh over 30 years now. How did you first become involved in expert witnessing?
Speaker 1It goes back quite a number of years, I think it goes back over 20 years and it just really came out of an inquiry. I mean, you know, some law firm in town was looking for someone to help adjudicate the interpretation of I think at the time it was an insurance claim claim. And they called me up and they say could you help? And I said I'll do my best. You know, I'm not trained as a lawyer, but I've been told I ought to have been one by some people who and sometimes that's said in a very friendly way and sometimes it's not, you know, but you know how that works.
Speaker 2Absolutely, and you know most experts aren't attorneys necessarily outside of the patent and IP field. A lot of those guys are. So what was that first phone call like? Was it out of the blue? Is it something that you were trying to court engagements, or I wasn't?
Speaker 1trying to court anything at the time. I mean, it just really did come out of the blue. It was a local inquiry. You know, so many of these things come up where someone calls the university or calls the department and calls the chair of the department or somebody else and says do you know anybody who can? And you know, and sometimes they'll call a person like me, sure, and sometimes they'll just put something out on an email list and say, oh, we have an inquiry from so-and-so, and then sometimes it's a reporter, sometimes it's a law firm, sometimes it's someone who wants help with something and I have a. I guess it's a problem that I have that I very often respond to these things because I don't know where it's going to go and I'm just curious. So you know, curiosity kills the cat and curiosity can also get business, I suppose.
Speaker 2Absolutely. What sorts of questions did they ask to vet whether or not you were the right person for the engagement?
Speaker 1Well, this is an interesting thing. I was thinking about this before this call. Very often I've had situations in you know I've only done maybe fewer than 10 of these right and they have been law firms. My most recent one was with a public defender's office that was reaching out. They very often just want to know can you help? We have this problem. We have, let's say, there's an exclusion clause in an insurance policy and there's an argument over the wording or phrasing. Do you think you can help? And sometimes they will send it to me and they'll send me a text and say do you think you could help with interpreting this Right?
Speaker 2Sure.
Speaker 1And more often than not, if someone gives me a problem, I can, and if it has to do with language I mean not to do with, I can't be your psychologist or psychiatrist, but if it has to do with language I can probably solve the problem.
Speaker 1And so what I was going to say was and this goes back to the kind of questions one would get, and this was a lesson learned, and this was a lesson learned they say you know not to you know, like don't give away the milk because then they won and linguistic expertise in the field. And this is that experts on chemical processes, experts on patent law, experts on um, I would say construction or other kinds of things, are known to be experts and recognized as experts and no one questions their expertise. And no one who needs an expert, let's say for a drug case or for some sort of chemical case or harms done by some pollutant, is going to, you know, second guess the expert in that case. But I can assure you that one of the most common things a linguist faces is being second guessed by the lawyers that engage him.
Speaker 2That's, that's interesting. And in what ways do they try?
Speaker 1and you know, impeach your your expertise, it's not my experience is not that they try to impeach my expertise, because I usually, if I get on a case and if I have something to say, I will say it in a way that is unimpeachable, I promise you. However, I have had at least one occasion might've been two where I had an attorney get on the phone with me and present me with the problem that they had, and they said how would you solve this problem? And I told them you know off the cuff, you know well, this would be my approach, and they said that's great, that's a really good idea. Thank you very much. And I never heard again.
Speaker 1Because why? Because sometimes a language problem can be solved very easily or relatively easily, and people who trade in language in general and that includes people in the law profession see themselves and rightly so as experts in language, because that's what lawyers do is they are experts in language. Now, I would say one caveat here, and that is that the lawyer who basically picked my brain for an answer, got the answer and never called me back again, probably did not come to court with the best argument he could have made, because I assure you that if I get my hands on a passage and I can do pretty good things with it, and that's kind of goes into the realm of well, what do you do, what can you do, what needs to be done and that I can. We can talk about that.
Speaker 2Sure, how do you protect yourself from that sort of occasion where just the initial phone call can give them everything that they well, that they perceive they need to know anyway? Is it a matter of being proactive and saying, hey, I can't answer, I know how to do this, but I'm not going to do it until you engage me. How do you deal with that?
Speaker 1Yes, having had a number of cases and having done this job numbers of times, I can easily give somebody a sample of what I've done which is not pertinent to their case. And I say well, here are a couple of affidavits that I've drawn up. You can see from what I've done how I do it and, if you like, the quality of this work. I'd be happy to engage with you and we can go on with your problem. And that bypasses the issue of so how would you solve my problem? Right, Sure?
Speaker 2So linguistics, you know, as a lay person, I speak well. I speak two languages, but not a lot as a lay person.
Speaker 1As a lay person, is linguistics a dynamic enough field that you feel the need to constantly be, you know, stay on top, to remain an expert? In other words, a lot of you know medical and engineering professionals need to stay on top of a lot of stuff. What about linguistics? How do you remain an expert in your field? Well, I think that becoming an expert in language and linguistic interpretation of the law and of legal documents is something that you get to, and once you've done it, once you have learned to do it well, I don't think that there's a lot to keep up with as a linguist, as a researcher, there's a lot to keep up with methods-wise and so on. I mean in terms of my own research, my own experiments and, you know, and working with students. But I would make it, I would say it's more akin to virtuosity with an instrument than it is like keeping up with the technicalities of a particular technical profession. Once you've learned to play the piano, or once you've learned to play the violin, and if you are a virtuoso and someone hands you music, if you're good enough, you can play and you can probably pay better than someone who's only been doing it for two years or three years, right, right. So, and the key thing here it's not that, it's not the technical issues, so much as making your observations understandable to the lay person, to the court, to the witnesses, to a jury.
Speaker 1I mean, because what I can't do as an expert and I can't do it I mean experts in physics and chemistry and medicine tend to go off in their own professional jargon quite a bit. When you're talking about language, you really can't do that. You really have to render what you're saying in very, very clear ways and you have to be able to back it up with examples. And one of the things that I think comes with the territory, comes with the expertise, is being able to come up with, concoct or otherwise find examples in real, natural language of what you're trying to tell people.
Speaker 2Huh, so you're learning kind of by metaphor to some extent.
Speaker 1Well, yeah, I mean. So let me give you one quick and dirty example. Sure, this comes from a I think it was from a cartoon strip, a shoe If you remember the cartoon strip shoe, it was like a long time ago. And one of the characters in shoe is saying to the other one you know, marge, um, marge says that she tried the dress on. That was, she tried the dress on in the window of the department. And yeah, I get where this is right and so and so and so.
Speaker 1The character says you know, marge, they do have dressing, and that's the joke, right? So the joke is based on what? The joke is based on an ambiguous sentence right.
Speaker 1Subject object agreement kind of yeah, in other words try it on in the window, or try the dress that's in the window on right. I mean, there are various ways to phrase it. What happens is this there is a very, very slippery slope between written language and spoken language, and when people write they often have the language in their head, they know what they mean, and what happens is that we, as language users, extract a tremendous amount out of the oral recitation of the language. So you could say she tried the dress in the window on, or she tried on the dress in the on, or she tried on the dress. She tried on the dress in the window, or she tried on the dress. Pause, in the window right. And they mean two different things. Well, guess what?
Speaker 1When you type a sentence, when you write a sentence, you don't have the intonation, you don't have the pauses. You can insert commas if you're strategic, but sometimes even commas don't help you. So I'm just giving one kind of example, and one of the interesting things about language and this is another possibly, you know, oncoming right field for litigation, I think is the difference between what we do verbally and what we do in digital devices, texting. You can imagine the uncertainties and the misunderstandings that take place over texts. We all know this and the text world has not caught up with spoken, because when we text somebody, we think we're talking, but we're not really talking, we're typing. And when we type what we think we said, we tend to make all kinds of errors and we tend to propagate misunderstandings that are very often wind up being memes. You know a lot of internet memes out of texts, you know so. There's that you know. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2It makes a lot of sense. It reminds me I read an article a couple years back that made the case that the way that young people use emojis, they're using it like punctuation, I think, to try and convey some of those long pauses and get a little bit more meaning across. Now, unfortunately, we can't use it in things like expert witness reports with a bunch of smiling faces.
Linguistic Expertise vs. Technical Fields
Speaker 1One of the interesting things about legal language is that sometimes legal language gets so kind of convoluted in an attempt to be clear that it winds up being worse off after it's been done right. So you get a situation where someone sort of falls all over themselves trying to be clear, and as they are trying to be more and more clear, their verbiage becomes ever more complex and harder and harder to unravel. And it's almost like you know, when you're weaving I don't know a scarf or something like that. If you have enough loops and turns and curls and everything and stitches in it, you're even more likely to have some knots in the fabric that you didn't want, and the knots are very hard to unravel sometimes, and that's the kind of the language that lawyers and people who write laws get into.
Speaker 1I mean, the most recent case I had was a public defender's office who was trying to argue against people having to put up an inordinate sum of money to guarantee their bail. The law was clearly not intending that, but the way it was written by someone in some office who was trying to make things clearer was not cognizant of the fact that when they said this one or that one or he or she or whatever you're using pronouns, you're using references to previous passages in this, in the paragraph, and it gets very, very convoluted and and that's where I come in and I say okay, well, let me unpack that for you, right?
Speaker 2expert witnesses do a lot of writing. They write expert witness reports, they write affidavits and they write in their own day-to-day work in academia. You know I'm sure, that you've published before. How can expert witnesses who are not linguists make sure that they are being simultaneously precise but also understandable, in the sense that people are picking up what they're saying the way that they actually meant?
Speaker 1it Right? Well, that's a really good question and it's an important question. It's something that I work with my own students in writing and it's something that I've kind of worked my whole life in my own writing to do, and that's this. You have something very complicated to say. However, you have to be, you have to be able to hear what you're saying as you write. You have to be able to step outside your own writing and be your own audience. It's that having that internal editor in your head. And I would say this you know, for the novice and I was once a novice, I mean, I'm old now but I used to be a novice and the interesting thing is that for the novice, there's nothing better than getting yourself an audience if you haven't cultivated your own internal audience. So, going back in time and this is not as a linguistic expert but as a linguist writing as a linguist, sure, I was writing my dissertation, and this goes back decades, and my girlfriend at the time was my audience and I would show her a page or a passage or something that I had written and she she'd read it and she'd look up at me and say I don't get it, what are you trying to say here, and then I would. I would start to explain to her what the passage meant and what the page meant, what I was trying to get across, and she'd look at me deadpan and she'd say, well, write that and so and so, in this process of doing that, you learn to be clear, because you learn that you've got to do certain things to make it clear to your audience what you're talking about. I'm always and there's some critical things Never introduce a term without telling people what it means.
Speaker 1Don't assume people know what. Now you can always use a term if you've made it clear you don't wanna overpopulate what you're writing with terminology. But you can certainly use a term if it's needed. And you have to decide is it needed, is plain language better? And sometimes plain language can be better, and sometimes plain language is in itself confounding and imprecise. And you have to say, no, I have to go with a term and I have to go with some terminology here. But when you introduce the terminology, you always explain what you mean. It's like acronyms. I mean if you go into the military or anywhere near the military, people love acronyms. And I tell my students all the time do not, ever, even if everyone knows it. Don't ever use an acronym without first spelling it out. So you spell out what you mean and then you can use the acronym say um, uh. If someone were really be able to say uh, uh, hiv human in immunovirus immunodeficiency.
Speaker 2Yeah see, I don't even know what it is um, but, but.
Speaker 1But if I was going to use that, that acronym, in a document, even though I know that everybody knows it, I would spell it out and then I would use it. So there are these kind of tweaks or tricks that you really want to be as sensitive to and, like I said, I've gotten to a point. You know virtuosity comes with advantages. I've gotten to a point where I can read back to myself what I write and hear it as an audience and know if it was clear or not. But for years and years and years, I would always show someone what I've read what I've written or, even better yet, I would read aloud what I've written. The best trick for good writing is to read it aloud. I catch so many of my own errors and missteps, even when I read what I've written aloud to myself. I'll never, ever send something off without even sometimes email messages. I will read them out, because you catch yourself.
Speaker 2It's interesting, While you were saying that, before you had said to read it aloud, my mind was saying I wonder if it would be useful to read it aloud, record it and have and recording it and playing it back and hearing what it sounds like, but the key thing here is that one never that clarity whether it's in testimony in a courtroom or whether it's you know, or whether it's in an affidavit needs to be heard, needs to be read aloud.
Speaker 1I mean one of the interesting things also and I I take this because I teach my students this all the time um, sometimes you've given a certain amount of time to speak and one of the difficult things that often people have is they go over time. I mean, you see this in congress all the time. I'm reclaiming my time. I'm reclaiming my time. I'm reclaiming my time. The Congresswoman is out of time. This kind of thing it's constant and one of the things this is a go-to and it's something that it's a guide which I think is useful for anybody who's writing or going to be speaking.
Speaker 1How fast do you speak? About 120 words a minute. We speak at a normal. Unless you're an auctioneer, you're going to be speaking about two words a second, and two words a second is about 120 to 125 words a minute. Now, if you have to plan to speak for five minutes, write 750 words. Don't write more. You won't be able to say them.
Speaker 1If you want to know how many words that is, get yourself Times Roman 12-point type, put yourself one-inch margins around the page and you will find that 250 words or two minutes of text will go on a page. So this is just a guideline. I tell my students this all the time because they have to present in class and I say I'm going to give you a 10 minute presentation and if you go over 10 minutes I'm going to cut you off. So write 1,200 words, don't write more, and you'll get through your talk in time. And this is and just as a cheat that I've used for years. On average, 10 lines of Times Roman 12 point type with one inch margins is a minute six seconds a line. It's a good hack. It's a hack that works. I mean, I would very often when I was preparing for talks, public talks, you know, where I had 20 minutes I would not practice my talk because it would just take too long to say the talk over and over and over again. I would just read them and count lines.
Speaker 2Sure, absolutely, if it works, it works.
Speaker 1If it works, it works works. If it works, it works, I promise it works.
The Ambiguity of Language
Speaker 2I promise it works so if, if I may extend the musician metaphor a little bit further uh, in in a case of sight reading, in other words, say you're in a deposition, you haven't had time to prepare exactly what you said, how can you still use some of these techniques to answer things, answer questions in real time in a way that is, again, specific and precise, but also understandable in the way that you intend?
Speaker 1Yeah Well, okay, just caveat here I haven't actually sat in front of a court and been deposed.
Speaker 2Sure, but you've been peppered with questions from your students.
Speaker 1Yeah, I do. I answer questions from students all the time and I think one of the I mean, if there's a hack there of any kind, the hack is to listen carefully, To listen carefully to the question and to make sure that you've heard the question completely and clearly before you try to jump into an answer. And sometimes what that means is could you say that again, or could you repeat the question? Or could you repeat? I didn't catch this word or that word in your question.
Speaker 1I mean, asking someone to repeat their question is never perceived to be offensive. At least I've never, you know, found that to be the case. And if anything, asking someone to repeat their questions so that you can, number one, make sure you heard it correctly and, number two, perhaps give yourself another few seconds to figure out what you want to say, because that's also part of it. Right, that's never badly received, Because if you ask someone to repeat their question so that you can clarify exactly what they mean, what it tells them is you're listening carefully and you're listening to them. You're not jumping on their question with whatever pre-positioned answer you might have had right. So it's both respectful and it's useful at the same time, and you can't beat that right.
Speaker 2When you talk about respectfulness and kind of etiquette generally, what are the sorts of things that make a person seem simultaneously relatable but an expert, in not only a courtroom setting but even vis-a-vis your attorney?
Speaker 1your trial team.
Speaker 2And kind of a part B to that question is how does that change? Or does it change in a telepresence or a Zoom sort of situation?
Speaker 1Well, I mean, first of of all, there is a sweet spot. There is a sweet spot where you don't want to talk to your audience, to your questioner, to your court, to your little, to you, to the attorney you're dealing with. You don't want to talk to them and and and and and sound as though you think they're stupid. Okay, um. At the same time, you also don't want to sound stupid yourself, you don't want to sound like a simpleton, and I think that the, the, the again you're looking for. You're looking for these sweet spots, and I think that I've always told people you know in terms of and this has to do with job talks and stuff like when students of mine go out and they have to go to audition for a department, for a professorship or something. They're trying to get hired you go into a job talk and you want to impress the audience, but if you confuse the audience and lose the audience, and the audience is left scratching their heads without knowing what they've heard, you've lost the audience. At the same time, if you make the audience feel like you think they're idiots, you've also lost the audience. So one of the things to do is to make sure that you are clear Again.
Speaker 1You know some of these hacks are like don't overburden your audience with terminology. Sure, it's hard to follow. At the same time, if there's terminology that is useful and meaningful and which you know how to use because you're the expert, do use it Right. I mean, I'm talking about parts of speech, I'm talking about verbs and adjectives and prepositions. I've certainly they're not just words, and so there's ways to talk about stuff that betray that you kind of know what you're talking about. And if you really do know what you're talking about, and if you really do know what you're talking about, it's not hard to sound like an expert. What is hard to do more often is to keep from being impenetrable, inscrutable. Right, I mean some people, and it is the case. I mean this is unfortunately the case in academia and it's one of the burdens of academia is that people go in and they think somehow carefully to their overly technical and overly convoluted talks and realizing after 20 minutes that what they said they could have said in about two minutes and we could have all had coffee earlier.
Speaker 1Absolutely To that end does levity play a role in relatability and you know, and and and being a little bit humorous is certainly helpful. I mean, we're talking now, we're enjoying this talk and I'm enjoying talking to you and and and hopefully I'm saying things that are relatable and are somewhat on the edge of being entertaining, right. They are Absolutely somewhat on the edge of being entertaining, right. They are absolutely yeah, and so if you can do that without you know turning yourself, without be clowning yourself, which is what you know if it's gone too far, I mean that's that's absolutely useful, because that's part of being relatable.
Speaker 1People want to know that you're human. People want to know that you're that. People want to know that you're not just curt and rude and people don't want to feel, when they're being talked to, that you think you know more than everyone else in the room. That's not the person at the party who you go back around to talk to after you've gotten another glass of wine. I mean, you know that person. You encountered them in the reception and they started talking to you and you know that they're just talking to you to prove to themselves that everyone else in the room is stupid and you never come back to them. You get your second glass of wine or your second beer and you go find someone else to talk to.
Speaker 2Absolutely, absolutely. Let's move to a couple more general topics. Expert witnessing generally. Why is it important? What does it mean to you as a linguist? Why is it important to have someone there to interpret some of these things?
Speaker 1Right, right, right, right. Okay, I'm going to give you two like a two-faced answer to that One. Why is it important to me? Which is like why do I, why do we even want to do this, or why do I like doing this Part of my desire or my urge to do this? I mean separately from any fees, because I don't.
Speaker 1I mean I don't do it enough that I could earn a living at it, right? Sure, I mean I do actually charge for my expertise because I think I got some expertise and if I'm going to spend my time on something, I'd like to be compensated. But more important than that is the challenge of. It is the challenge of can I take what I know, which is, at its foundation, pretty technical, pretty theoretical at its foundation, pretty technical, pretty theoretical. And can I find ways of taking what I know when I look at a text or when I hear testimony or whatever it is? Do I have ways of rendering what I know about language legible, understandable to someone who, let's say, has never taken a linguistics course, because most haven't. So this is a challenge for me. Now the other side of the coin is why is what I'm doing important to the whole process? Well, I'll take the last case that I dealt with as an example. This was the Public Defender's Office. They found me out, I guess, through my department. Maybe.
Speaker 1Somebody said oh, call Dubinsky, because they figured out that I do this stuff, and I talked to the public defender. He was a new guy in town. He said look, we're having a problem. They crafted a new law and they're interpreting the law in this particular way and we think the interpretation is wrong and we have people who are getting caught in this bind because they really shouldn't have to be paying inordinate sums to, you know, to like sort of deposit on their bail or there's some sort of arrangement that they make with the bailiff and stuff like that. So what was happening was that it was hurting people who should not be sitting in jail based on their interpretation of the law, but the district attorney's interpretation of it was the other way and they were keeping people locked up.
Writing with Clarity for Non-Experts
Speaker 1So I walked in I said I think I can help. Let let me take a look at this, and I unpacked it in ways that I know that others would not have been able to do, because I know my way around the field. I know where to look for examples, I know how to create examples, and part of the part of as a linguistic expert, part of what I can do well, is I can create parallel examples to what is in the text that are far more clear than what the text has right, sure, so I can look at the text and say you see this text? Well, if I change these words into these words over here and now you have a very, very clear, transparent sentence. Look what it means. It doesn't mean what you think it means, and so you know. You can unpack that, and that is expertise.
Speaker 1And so the importance of this, let's say, is that, in the case of the insurance claims that I dealt with, one knows, if one knows law and you're trained in law is that in an insurance policy, if an insurance policy is ambiguous or vague or indeterminate, then the tie goes to the runner. In other words, the tie goes to the insured, not the insurer. Why is that? Well, the insurer wrote the policy. So if you wrote the policy, you had every opportunity to make it clear. And if you didn't make it clear, I'm subject. I couldn't rewrite the policy and give it back to you and say here's my edits of your policy. I signed the policy that you wrote.
Speaker 1So now, if you didn't write the policy, well, I'm not going to be made to suffer for your inability to write a clear policy, but in many cases, making it clear that a particular passage is ambiguous is not so easy to do. You have to be able to show. Well, if you change these words to those words, it would mean this, and if you change the words differently to these words, it would mean that, and if you change the words differently to these words, it would mean that. So therefore, it's ambiguous. And these are, like you said, the virtuosity piece comes into play when you have to, on the fly or not on the fly, but in the course of, you know, sitting at your desk and coming up with examples of how you would unpack it for again, for a non-linguist. That's where it becomes very important, I think.
Speaker 2Yeah, very astute. One of the things you would briefly mention was getting paid. I wanted to ask you if you have any specific terms that you like to have in engagement contracts. Do you like to, for example, take a retainer or do you prefer a project rate? How do you like to bill?
Speaker 1I've got a rate schedule and it's constructed in what I think to be a fair way, so I'll explain it. First of all, I think if someone wants my time or wants my expertise, they should at least want it for a day. I mean, in other words, if you call me up and get me engaged in your project and want me to, you know, do something for you, and you want to hire me for 30 minutes, I mean that's like you know. I mean that's like a, you know, like a short term motel. I mean you know, I'm not, I'm not going, I'm not, I'm not checking into the motel with you by the hour, I'm not doing that. If we're going to have a date, we're going to have a date and it'll be at least one day. So my, my thought is you know, like, so I actually do ask for a refundable retainer.
Speaker 1Then I, you know, I figure the rest of it because if, if you work for a business, you pay, you get paid about half the labor cost. If you work for McDonald's and get paid $15 an hour, mcdonald's is basically having to lay out $30 for every hour of your work, for the overhead and everything else that they have to do. So if I'm hiring myself out, then I am the proprietor and the employee and I will double my university hourly wage. Now what I don't do is I don't charge that same rate when I'm traveling or moving around. If you want to fly me up to Washington for something and I'm coming through the airports and I'm flying on a plane for five hours, you should be paying something for that, but not the kind of rate that you would pay for testimony or for writing a deposition or something or writing an affidavit, because I'm on a plane and I could be doing other work on the plane, which I am doing, I can assure you right, I have things to do.
Speaker 1So that's kind of like the way I've framed stuff for myself. I don't know if that's fair. I think it is. I've never gotten any squawks about it. And one thing I will say also is like for the public defender's office, I gave them a pro bono rate because I don't feel like the public defender's office that I it's not like a private law firm Right and it is, and so what I do at a. But I also don't think I should be donating my effort to the public defender's office for nothing, because it it diminishes or devalues what I'm, what, what I can do and what I am doing. So I cut that by 50%. So if I do anything for a bono, I will do a 50% rate, without questions, right.
Speaker 2For travel expenses? Do they prepay or do you typically get reimbursed for those?
Speaker 1I would probably not ask anybody to prepay travel expenses just because I'm used to it. My university won't prepay anything I do. If I go to a conference, they'll guarantee me funding for a conference, but I have to come home and present them with all the receipts and all the invoices and stuff. In fact, one of the things that the university is very, very, very, very careful about is they won't pay for an air ticket until you've proven that you've actually taken the flight. There's a lot of shenanigans that can come from having people like buy a ticket and then not take the flight. You know and get credit for it. So they're careful about it and I don't mind that in a sense, because one of the things about travel and travel expenses is that you really don't know sometimes what you're going to encounter right, right, right.
Speaker 1It could be a lot less than what you planned on, it could be more than what you planned on, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 2Absolutely All right. So you get your engagement letter and you've signed and you've agreed on a rate. How do you get off on the right foot with an attorney? What are the aspects of a good attorney, consultant or expert witness relationship?
Speaker 1Well, I think you really want to get to know each other a little bit before you strike out and start to do stuff. I don't think you want to just have somebody send you something and then you just deliver a response. First of all, you don't know what they really want and you need to learn what they need from you before you can even begin to try to do it. So if somebody were to say to you well, this insurance policy is, you know, is somehow deficient, or we're arguing about this issue, I'd want to be, I'd want to have a person you know, like a conversation with the person I was trying to help to know what had come before, what they think the pitfalls are. I need to know what they expect the counters to be, because obviously they're more familiar with the case than I'm going to be. By the time they come to me, or by the time they come to an expert witness, they've probably already been doing some things and they've gotten to the point where, oh, we think we got to get an expert witness in here to help us. So it's not you. Never I don't think.
Speaker 1I don't think in any case, I've ever come into. It's never been in a vacuum. It's never been the case that, oh, we're going to go to court and the first thing we're going to do is let's, let's is let's get our expert witnesses in line. That's not. I don't think that happens ordinarily. I mean, maybe in some cases where there's, you know, some chemical process or drug case or something like that, you can kind of need to line up your expertise. But I think, at least in the case of the kind of expertise that I bring to a court case, I think they have found themselves kind of in a little bit of a corner, in a little bit of a jam, and they're searching around and saying, hmm, maybe if we got a linguistics expert witness we could make our case stronger, right, sure.
Finding the Sweet Spot in Communication
Speaker 2And while you have not been to testimony, do you feel that you have had sufficient time to put together the affidavit or the demonstrative or whatever it is that the attorney needs? Do they typically come to you with sufficient information, sufficient time? Are you able to do your job in the schedule that they set out?
Speaker 1Pretty much. Pretty much, I mean, in any case, where there's a document involved, I would say this it takes a little bit of time for you to kind of get the background. It takes a little bit of time to read the document and to kind of focus your mind on what it is. That is the issue. And then, once you've done that, you've got to go out and you've got to say, ok, how am I going to make this argument? Once you've done that, you've got to go out and you've got to say, okay, how am I going to make this argument, how am I going to unpack this linguistic puzzle and solve it? And very often what that then involves is going to some resources, going to published papers, going, in other words, because I'm not the only expert in the world on linguistics.
Speaker 1There are a lot of other people who came before me and will come after me, who know a lot as much about language as I do, and sometimes more so. Part of my job, as it were, is to go out and find citation-worthy evidence and arguments that have been made by others, not necessarily on this particular point, but arguments about the same sort of issue or the argument same, and you can find these. I'm not going to find my citational worthy evidence in court cases or legal documents. I'm going to find it in the course of looking online at linguistic explanation, sometimes done for courses, sometimes in textbooks, sometimes in blogs and published papers on things you know. Yeah, I had one experience recently where I had to go into the use of the word. However, I had to go into the use of the word, however, right now, however, has two uses Sometimes it's followed by a comma, Sometimes it's not, and sometimes the fact that they put the punctuation or not is belies what they meant. Sure.
Speaker 1You can say however you do the job, make sure you do it well, however, and then there's the other however, I don't think you're going to do it well, right? So so there's two uses of however in those two sentences, right, and they mean different things, um and so, yes, there have been blog posts and articles written about those interpretations. So you know, like, because I know my way around a little bit, I can find those, I can bring them to the table and I can insert them into an affidavit, which is going to be, you know, sort of court worthy, absolutely fascinating stuff.
Speaker 2Before we wrap up, do you have any last advice for expert witnesses or for attorneys that are working with expert witnesses and in particular, newer expert witnesses um?
Speaker 1you know, don't, especially with respect to language and linguistics. I understand that legal minds are legal minds and they're sharp. You don't get to be an attorney unless you kind of are good with language. You cannot do it um at the same time. You're not. You're trained to be good with language. You're not trained to unpack and analyze language. And I would make this analogy Everyone knows what time it is.
Speaker 1Everyone who has a digital watch with buttons on it, except for me, knows how to reset it and how to change the settings on it and adjust it for your daylight savings time. I don't, so I beg off on that one. My watch is the same time you know throughout the year. I just adjust in my head. But the point is that everyone who knows how to operate a watch or operate a TV remote or operate a clock, knows how to operate it. But when it comes to language, as a linguist I can open up the back of the watch, show you the springs and you won't know what it's doing. But the linguist is the person who's the watchmaker, the person who can open up the back of the device and tell you why it's not working or how it needs to work or what the confusion stems from right. So that's and I would ask you know, lawyers who might be listening to this this to not think less of yourself that you have a language problem, but to acknowledge that sometimes you walk into a language conundrum which needs to be analyzed properly, and that's when you find yourself in that kind of a cul-de-sac. That's the time that you do want a person who's an expert, a cul-de-sac, that's the time that you do want a person who's an expert, and it's no shame, it's no embarrassment to acknowledge that. Hey, I think I need somebody who can actually analyze this, and so that's what a linguist can do for you.
Speaker 1As far as expert witnesses in general, take me back to the second piece of your question that you asked. Well, I think you know, I would think number one. I think you need to rely on your knowledge. You can think of being an expert witness as a challenge, as a learning opportunity, because I look at every case I've ever taken to me has been a learning opportunity and a challenge.
Speaker 1Can I do this? Do I have the chops to get this done properly and can I make it work really well? I mean, certainly if you do something successful as an expert witness, if you produce an affidavit, or if you sit in court and give testimony, or if you give consultation to a lawyer, that is worthy and that they can then use and win with. That is testimony to your abilities, and you want to revel in that a little bit. You want to say, hey, look what I can do, I can win court cases. Having the expertise and the chops to help somebody win a court case, and having the expertise to convince your students that you're right, because your students are always going to be convinced you're right because their A depends on it. The court does not care about getting a grade from you, and so you have to be better than that, right.
Speaker 2Absolutely sage advice, Professor Dubinsky. Thank you so much for joining me here today.
Speaker 1You're welcome. It was a pleasure to be here.
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.