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 Clinical & Forensic Psychologist, Dr. Leslie Dobson
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In this episode…
Comfortable is credible, according to Dr. Dobson. She advises strong familiarity with your audio and video setup, so you aren't fumbling about during remote sessions. Additionally, she recommends that experts practice not only what they say, but the pronunciation and manner of delivery
Check out the entire episode for our discussion on social media versus publication, acting as a rebuttal witness, and knowing your worth.
About our guest:
Dr. Leslie Dobson, is a clinical and forensic psychologist with a private practice. She is an expert in forensic psychology focusing on civil law and forensic evaluations for sexual abuse allegations. Dr. Dobson holds a Doctor of Psychology from Loma Linda University.
Introduction to Dr. Leslie Dobson
Speaker 1This episode is brought to you by Roundtable Group the experts on experts. We've been connecting attorneys with experts for over 30 years. Find out more at roundtablegroupcom.
Speaker 2Welcome to Engaging Experts. I'm your host, snowel Balmer, and today I'm excited to welcome Dr Leslie Dobson to the show. Dr Dobson is a clinical and forensic psychologist with a private practice. She is an expert in forensic psychology, focusing on civil law and forensic evaluations for sexual abuse allegations. Dr Dobson holds a doctorate of psychology from Loma Linda University. Dr Dobson, thank you so much for joining me here today on Engaging Experts.
Speaker 3Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 2Of course, let's jump into it. So you've been a clinical psychologist for gosh over a decade, over 12 years now. How did you first get involved in expert witnessing?
From Criminal to Civil Psychology
Speaker 3Oh, I originally wanted to work with very dangerous people. I wanted to work with the most mentally ill people in the world. I just, you know, that's where I take everything to the extreme Sure, and my vision because I came from a clinical program was that I would go inside the jails and prisons and I would work with them and try to understand their minds. And I became very interested in violence risk assessment and sexually violent risk assessment. So I wanted to know, you know, how do we know if they're dangerous? How do we know if they're going to recidivate or do this again? What is the science behind this, when we've always seen psychology as a soft science rather than a harder science like psychiatry and other medicines? And so, as I learned more about the statistics and the research that goes into making a true forensic psychologist, I wanted to teach juries that, and lawyers found it very helpful that I could explain it to a jury because I had only recently learned it myself. Right, I was pretty young in my career and as I started my family, I moved out of the criminal side into the civil side one because of my own safety. The last day I was working in a state hospital, there was a hit on me and I was told to just get out. And two, because civil litigation allows me to be so much more creative and I absolutely love the creativity of you know.
Speaker 3I want to look at a person pre-injury. I want to see what they were like their family, their friends, academics, everything. I want to see the alleged injury Was it an assault of some type? Was it a car accident? I want to see then how everything about them changed afterwards. Now. Did we exacerbate things that were already present in their psychology, or did this incident do it? And do we have science to back that of numerous tests and batteries and screeners, semi-structured conversations and interviews where I can show that somebody is valid and truthful, or I can show that they are faking good or faking bad and they're not reliable. So you know, I get hired by the lawyers as an expert and they don't know where I'm going to go. Right, they don't. I'm not biased, I'm gonna let the numbers play out and sometimes they're not happy.
Speaker 2Well, tell me about some of those first phone calls that you ever got. Was it out of the blue? Were you seeking expert witness engagements? How did that first come about?
Speaker 3One of the first that I got was kind of through friend of a friend, and it was when we started doing certificates of merit, so individuals over 40 years old could sue in civil litigation for sexual assault, but they had to have the certificate of merit from a mental health professional stating that they were valid and reliable in their story and that their memory was still intact, and a variety of other things that I would talk to them about.
Speaker 3And so as I started hearing more and more of their stories and my certificates were put into the court and then they could sue and their lawsuits started, I gained more of a reputation to then be the expert on cases that were then moving forward, and so I can remember some of my first phone calls being so excited, so excited to get to know the person and then, wow, after hundreds, all I heard were the patterns.
Speaker 3All I heard were the patterns of the Catholic priests, the patterns of the Jehovah's Witness brothers and the elders, and then I started studying the Bible. I wanted to understand Deuteronomy 1915, and you need two witnesses. I started to want to really understand the full mindset of the individual, how they were harmed, but how they were held captive by the authority and the entity that they were in, and it might've been a school right, anything, it could just be a boss, you know, it could be a music Mongol, but I wanted to be able to articulate their world and see it and see the damage it caused to them. So I became very excited and I I overeducated myself.
Speaker 2Sure, sure, absolutely. Did you have anyone kind of showing you the ropes or mentoring you at all in terms of what to expect for an expert witness engagement, or did you kind of just hit the ground running or jump in the pool?
Speaker 3My father's a lawyer. I should add that I'm surrounded by lawyers all the time because of his friendships, but then I also knew many lawyers working on the criminal side, and so I reached out to a lot. I took a lot of CEs. If there's a lesson on updates to the PAI the personality assessment inventory I'm going to pay $600 to take that, and it's worth it, right, because of the work that comes from your knowledge. And then, as things moved forward, I didn't have to relearn the content because I'm doing it so frequently now that I'm better on the stand, I'm better in depositions, my reports are more linear and they hit home harder, and I'm better at engaging the client in deep, deep things in a faster way.
Handling Social Media Fame
Speaker 2Sure, All right. So, Dr Dobson, we have an elephant in the room that needs to be addressed, and that is that you are actually internet famous. We don't have to get into the entirety of the TikTok drama, but I am interested in how being internet famous interplays with your career as an expert witness. Is this something that comes up in initial phone calls, in depositions at trial? How does this incident affect your career? Negative, positive or otherwise?
Speaker 3Um, I don't know if I I I'm not a good gauge for the negative part of it, because if they're not calling I wouldn't know Right, but what I can say is that I'm getting a lot of jobs. I I have attorneys calling me several times a day retaining me as an expert, and a lot of it is because I'm very transparent. Um, you can go on my social media and you can see how I talk to the world. From third grade up. We should all be able to understand a concept and I can give that to you. You also see on my social media that I don't back down and that I can hold myself in cross examination and that I'm not fearful. Things lawyers like in an expert they can see. So it's almost like social media became a very big interview and curriculum vita for me.
Speaker 2Oh, that's really interesting. So when your life is out there, when you are heavily using social media, do you ever worry about oh boy, if I say one off word, somebody's going to bring that up in a deposition or in court, or do you just not worry about it? What's your social media strategy?
Speaker 3I try to stay away from politics and religion on social media. One because I would lose half my followers and two because it is so biased but I come from. I joke a lot, I use a lot of dark satire, but I also come from truth and authenticity and transparency and I am going to teach people what they are maybe too ignorant or too scared to hear. And if I need to bring statistics into that and research, I will. And then if an attorney tries to use it against me or tries to discredit me, I hold faith in the other attorney to show the counterpart I know how to engage an audience. I have half a million followers in just one year, but that also comes with. That's a lot of fun for lawyers to use in their favor in a case.
Trial Preparation and Presentation Techniques
Speaker 2So you've been doing this for a while. You have a lot of fun for lawyers to use in their favor in a case, so you've been doing this for a while. You've have a lot of cases behind you. Let's talk a little bit about your preparation methods. So this is something I like to ask all of my guests. Some people have some very specific rituals. I like to do yoga and drink six cappuccinos and stand on my head before a trial, and some people like to listen to loud music, and some people, you know fast, some people don't do anything at all. What is your pre-trial ritual, if you have one at all?
Speaker 3Oh, I shouldn't give it away because I don't bill for it, but about a week before a trial I will. I will take the amount of information in a book and I will bring it down to a post-it note and I may need to write it by hand. I will have to memorize it. I will say it in front of the mirror, but I will memorize my report, but also the foundation of my report, which extends to this human's life, the party being sued and all of the statistics and science behind all the measurements being used, so that I want to walk up there not needing to remember anything but it, just feeling like it's a part of what I know. And the funny thing is I'm always over prepared. They, you know I always tell lawyers don't get in the weeds with a psychologist. It's really true. It's so in-depth our knowledge and if you can use the psychologist to have that depth shown, knowing the other side probably has not prepared enough to go into the weeds like that, you've won your case.
Speaker 2You talk about kind of memorizing, at least in broad strokes, your expert witness report and you know the important facts to the case. You can usually in most in most venues this is not true everywhere refer back to your report during a trial. You can take a moment and look at your report to refresh your memory. Do you find that it's better to have it memorized and not have to refer back to your report?
Speaker 3Yes, because I think the jury finds and the judge, because a judge will look at me as a young woman and discredit me immediately. So I think my credibility comes with the tightness of my answer and the tightness and speed of my response. But also the manipulation of looking at the report is a tactic they use and so if I can remove as many manipulative tactics and I can engage the manipulation by pausing and clearing my thoughts and stating my answer, then I maintain my confidence and the flow is better and the credibility remains.
Speaker 2Do you feel that your time on camera because obviously anyone who's heavily into social spends a lot of time on camera do you find that that helps you in connecting with judges during bench trials or juries or attorneys during depositions? Does it help you connect in general? Does it prepare you at all? And if so, the follow-up question is do you feel that that's something that everyone should be practicing in this day of Zoom depositions and Zoom trials and whatnot?
Speaker 3I think people need to be comfortable with their equipment. If they are doing Zoom, they need to flawlessly prepare in that way that your monitor is set up and your speaker and your mic is set up. A lot of the time, in my cases, we're talking about sexual things and lawyers don't pronounce words correctly, especially words of body parts, and they shy away from the interaction of, let's say, a grown male pedophile and a child. And if I can, on point, say you pronounced that incorrectly. It's not labia, it's labia. They lose track and I take control back, and so I think a lot of being on social media and receiving criticism from people and them saying you know, your voice is too soft, the vocal fry is too high right now, you're not looking at the camera, you're pixelated. You could have really honed in on that area, but you didn't. You shied away from it. Why? And now that I've started the podcast, I'm getting this even more in depth, but it's helping me actually concretize a good show and that is what testimony is.
Speaker 2Absolutely. Do you have a story or two about cases that you've been on that have either reinforced something that you already do or changed the way that you go about some aspect of expert witnessing?
Rebutting Other Experts
Speaker 3I was hired as the rebuttal psychologist. Those cases are a lot of fun. So I got to rip apart another psychologist's report and I found a lot of errors in the report. But what I found more interesting was looking at the video depositions of everyone in play in the case and pairing that with the errors in the report and bringing in my expertise of substance use into the case. So you can read a report and you can also read a transcript. But if you see somebody in timed increments going to the bathroom with the sniffles, their pupils dilated, their body movements restless, their fatigue coming at a certain point, that was very important for me in that case to say. Actually we didn't quite show that the individual was lying. But now it makes sense why the scales on the tests were this way. They're erratic because of the substance use and then I think within a day they settled.
Speaker 2Do you find that a lot of cases are moving to settlement these days?
Speaker 3They're not even moving to deposition. I mean, I'm being hired as a pre I don't know a scary pre-letter person. I'm being hired to do a full psychological evaluation on individuals and that is being presented as almost like a cash grab. And I'm okay with it because I just get my money by the hour and I will only speak to who I believe.
Speaker 3You know, lawyers will do what lawyers do right. But if I believe in the case and I truly believe a victim's injured, why put them through all of this deposition and testimony? Why re-injure them and re-traumatize them if I can do this ahead of time for them?
Speaker 2Do you have any other specific terms in your contract? For instance, do you take for travel? Do you have a different rate? Do you have a rate for depositions? Do you like to do project rates? Do you do hourly rates? How does the entirety of your billing schedule look?
Speaker 3It is a bit flexible with reading, information and review, because in psychology there is often a lot more to review, so I will sometimes go by page number reviews. So one to 100 is a certain fee. I don't actually know the fee that we've got set. So one to a hundred is a certain fee. I don't actually know the fee that we've got set. Or if that is just too extreme like I need to refresh my mind on the whole Bible, then I would just set a flat rate. There are some cases where I need to hire my own security. That has to come with me, and so we bring all of that into it. But you know, normally I pay for my own food and not my flights.
Speaker 2Have you worked in different venues, for example, civil versus criminal? Have you worked, you know, in different states? Have you worked for federal cases? What's it like working from one venue to the next? Do you have to make sure that you are somewhat familiar with the laws and procedures of those areas and, if so, how do you familiarize yourself? Do you talk to your attorney? What's your procedure for making sure that you're ready to go in a new and unfamiliar venue?
Speaker 3I ask the attorneys to save a couple hours before deposition or trial to educate me. But because they are hiring me as the expert, I put it on myself to do my research. So I'll seek out local psychologists. I work out of state all the time. And then the differences between superior, federal, all these courts. That to me, is almost like this trajectory of respect. That, to me, is almost like this trajectory of respect. So you know, the bigger, the higher the court federal court I feel like I owe the judge more respect and he will give it to me. The lower the court, the less professionalism I expect to see and meet. But I still carry myself the same way.
Speaker 2You had mentioned before that you have been a rebuttal witness. Let's talk about that a little bit. What is the difference between working, obviously, for the plaintiff and working for the defendant? What's it like being a rebuttal witness and starting with somebody else's expert witness report and responding to it?
Speaker 3starting with somebody else's expert witness report and responding to it. My case is I haven't evaluated the individual that I'm rebutting against. So I've been given all of the information and the report, all of the raw data from the evaluation, and I'll run everything through my own system again. I'll look for inconsistencies, I will do full item analyses. So we've got the MMPI 500 questions. We've got the PAI 300 questions and I'm going to go and look at every single one and see if that psychologist typed that in correctly and I'm going to see if there is any bias at all and then I'm going to go back and compare that to.
Speaker 3You know the history, you know the video. Did the psychologist take breaks? Was he condescending? Was the individual harmed by an adult male that looked like the psychologist? Could there be trauma present in the room? So basically, an opportunity to educate the attorneys on all of these differences. I think one of the key things that I don't think the industry knows right now this was put out by the Neuropsychological Association is that psychologists cannot give their raw data to anybody else but a psychologist, and that is our ethics. So if you hire a psychiatrist, then you don't get to see my numbers.
Speaker 2Just your conclusions.
Speaker 3Yes, and so the power is in the raw data. So you need to like we're shifting the culture. You need to hire a psychologist and not a psychiatrist if you really want psychological assessment.
Speaker 2How do you stay current in your field? This is obviously like we're talking about a fairly dynamic field. There's a lot that's happening, both legally, but also in terms of the medicine. How do you stay on top of everything to not only be an expert, but to remain an expert?
Speaker 3Definitely try and stay in my lane and I pay way too much for journals. I am a member of the American Psychological Association. I am a member of the American Psychological Association, california, los Angeles, orange County. I am in the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals, which is very diverse all the way to XDIA, and everyone's always sharing really relevant information and new research. And here's the key with social media is, if I read this stuff, then I can make a video on it and I have content. And the way that you build a presence on social media is by offering consistent content.
Building Expert-Attorney Relationships
Speaker 2So I educate myself, I grow on the social side, I increase my brand deals, I end up getting more jobs as an expert more jobs as an expert, Not to put too fine a point on it but is content the new being published by journals these days? In other words, is this the primary way in which young medical professionals can get some of their opinions out there, but in a digestible way that's useful to a more broad audience compared to publishing in a scientific journal?
Speaker 3100%, and those are my most viral videos, and I'm talking 10, 20 million views when I bring forward current research. It's incredible. I like to compare myself to a car accident. You're driving on the freeway and you don't really want to look, but you look and then you engage, and then you know you're staring and you're slowing down and you're really watching the gore. And that's my presentation on social media. You know, someone sees a attractive woman, a soft voice. They're like oh, what does she have to say? Okay, she's talking about a pedophile. They're like oh, what does she have to say?
Speaker 2Okay, she's talking about a pedophile? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, and that's definitely a juxtaposition there. How do you go about taking these potentially complex, difficult topics and breaking them down in a way that people can digest and understand but still convey the important bits to them? Because I imagine it's the same thing going into a jury trial right, you have a jury of laypersons. They're not necessarily going to be experts in your field, so you have to make it digestible, but it also has to convey all of the important information there in. How do you go about doing that?
Speaker 3Use a lot of neuropsychology, I'm clumping things, I am using the recency effect. I'll start with a big umbrella of information and then I'll keep going. I'll get more narrow and narrow and I'll let the attorney decide if it's too much and they want me to stop. So I need the attorneys to listen when I'm testifying, but what I do is you know, we need that broad scope understanding, we need the title, we need a line, the plot, and we need the conclusion.
Speaker 1And then, if you want me to go in.
Speaker 3I'll go in more.
Speaker 2Let's move to the general a little bit. What makes for a positive attorney expert relationship in your experience?
Speaker 3Transparency. Yeah, I think a lot of times attorneys will hold information back from me and I'll find out about the information on the stand, or I'll find out because it's in the other experts reports, and if you don't want to pay me to read it, that's one thing, but if you don't want me to read it because it's going to skew my opinion, it's going to come out, and so the consistency of information amongst everyone involved and the transparency of their theory and their method for me is very helpful, so that I'm not caught off guard and so that I don't overspeak or get too cagey over speak or get too cagey.
Speaker 2When you are in a larger trial, often there is a group of experts, not just one, there's a whole trial team. It can be assistants and paralegals and a team of attorneys and a bunch of people. How do you interact with all of these people? Are you pretty cordoned off in your own world, or is there some relationship between you and the other members, obviously, besides the lead attorney? Are you working with the other members of the trial team or are you pretty much in your own little world?
Speaker 3It really depends. I'm in my own world when it comes to coming up with my opinion and basing it on every piece of information I can get my hands on, which may be the other experts reports, but there is no going back and forth of oh, this is what I think. This is what I think right, like a jury might be doing. When it comes time to testify and to be around everyone, I tend not to talk to anyone. I mean, I will use bathrooms on different floors. I will just try to stay away from everyone because I don't want anyone thinking I'm colluding and using it against me.
Speaker 2Sure. Do you have any bad experiences that have become kind of learning experiences in your career?
Speaker 3I think, reminding myself to stay in my lane and that everybody has a role and a job and to not let the attorneys get under my skin, that's probably been the biggest lesson throughout all of this, because, you know, attorneys are masterful at it. Attorneys are masterful at it. And when I went to the trial and I was really young in my career and I sat there and I and I said to somebody wow, she is such a bitch, the lawyer. And it was a. It was another psychologist. And she said to me exactly, that's her job, she's doing her job. And I thought, wow, okay, we need to understand that this is a professional role and this is not personal.
Speaker 2Absolutely. Before we wrap up, do you have any last advice for experts and, in particular, newer expert witnesses or attorneys that are working with newer expert witnesses?
Final Advice on Expert Worth
Speaker 3For me, it's been very difficult to know my worth and my value, and I've had to learn that over time. I have $500,000 of student loan debt and I am worth more than an hourly fee. My name is worth something as well, so as soon as my name is entered and people are aware I'm a part of that case, the money starts to accrue, and so I had to learn that it feels weird to take money from people who need your help. It feels horrible to take money from vulnerable people, but I also have earned it and I'm good at my job and I have to remind myself of that. And then I also really like to remind myself how much, how much lawyers make. I don't get a percent.
Speaker 2Absolutely, Dr Dobson. Thank you so much for joining me here today. Thank you for having me. And, as always, thank you to our listeners for joining me for another episode of Engaging Experts, cheers. Thank you for listening 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.