Engaging Experts

Engaging with DEA Compliance and Pharmaceutical Quality Expert, Benjamin Mink

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The journey from law enforcement to expert witness isn't a common one, but for Benjamin Mink, it provided the perfect foundation for becoming a leading voice in DEA compliance and opioid litigation. In this revealing conversation, Mink shares how his background as an Alaska State Trooper and undercover narcotics detective uniquely positioned him to navigate the complex world of pharmaceutical compliance.

Mink's expertise wasn't developed in a classroom—it came through a "baptism by fire" when he joined a pharmaceutical distributor facing serious DEA enforcement actions and congressional investigations. This crisis immersion forced him to quickly master compliance regulations and risk mitigation strategies, skills that would later make him invaluable as an expert witness.

What makes Mink's approach particularly effective is his focus on translation rather than mere information delivery. "A good expert isn't necessarily an encyclopedia," he explains, "it's a good translator, somebody that can break it down to a jury to the point that it's easy to understand." This philosophy guides his preparation for depositions and courtroom testimony, where he strategically studies previous testimonies to anticipate opposing counsel's focus areas.

The conversation also explores practical aspects of expert witnessing—from preparation techniques and billing practices to navigating virtual testimony in the post-COVID era. Mink offers valuable insights for both experts and attorneys on building productive relationships, managing expectations, and the critical importance of careful listening during high-stakes depositions.

Whether you're an attorney working with expert witnesses, an expert looking to refine your approach, or simply curious about how technical information gets translated for juries, this episode offers rare insights into the art and science of expert testimony. Subscribe to Engaging Experts for more conversations with leading voices in litigation support and expert witnessing.

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This 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.

Noah Bolmer:

Welcome to Engaging Experts. I'm your host, noah Balmer, and today I'm excited to welcome Benjamin Mink to the show. Now, Mr. Mink is the CEO of GTC Consulting, a DEA compliance and litigation support firm. Additionally, he's on the board of directors for the Ohio chapter of the National Association of Drug Diversion Investigators and he is a leading expert in suspicious order monitoring in opioid litigation. Mr Mink holds a master's in criminal justice from Everest University at Tampa. Mr Mink, thank you so much for joining me here today on Engaging Experts. Thank you, noah, it's a privilege to be here. Of course, let's jump into it. So you've been an entrepreneur and a compliance professional for well over a decade now. How did you first become involved in expert witnessing?

Benjamin Mink:

You know, it's really one of those things that sort of found me. I was working for a pharmaceutical company in well, near Dayton, ohio, at the time, and they unfortunately had some compliance related issues that were for activities that took place before I ever arrived at the company. This was 2015 timeframe and ended up. An order to show cause was issued by the DEA against the company, which is a pretty severe enforcement action by the DEA. The State Board of Pharmacy was frequently visiting the United States. Congress became involved and started to investigate the company, so it was sort of a trial by fire situation. I had to very quickly immerse myself in understanding DEA compliance and quality and sort of all those things that go with risk mitigation in the pharmaceutical world, so I sort of experienced my intro to it in a baptism by fire sort of way.

Noah Bolmer:

Absolutely Tell me about that phone call. You know, you get this initial phone call out of kind of out of the blue and they're asking you a bunch of questions how do you, how do you, vet someone? How do you know whether or not this is something that you're willing to do, in that it's even in your wheelhouse?

Benjamin Mink:

You know I've always had a passion for public health and safety. Uh, my background is a little bit unique. A lot of guys that do what I do retire from the DEA and this is sort of a retirement thing for them. In my in my case I I started out in law enforcement at a city department and attended graduate school full time to obtain my master's and I advanced my career in law enforcement. I ended up becoming an Alaska state trooper.

Benjamin Mink:

I was featured on National Geographic when the show Alaska State Troopers came out and I went from there back to sort of central Louisiana where I started my law enforcement career out and took a position as an undercover narcotics detective working on a federal task force and sort of.

Benjamin Mink:

My dream was always to become a chief or a sheriff and kind of climb that ladder in the public service community, and I realized really quickly that one I was never going to be able to pay for my graduate school, unfortunately, in a public service career. So I began looking at other opportunities where I could still fulfill my passion for public health and safety while combining that with sort of a drug enforcement capacity, and so I naturally fell into the role that I took at Miami Lucan, which was the pharmaceutical distributor I mentioned and that was sort of kind of how that took place is. I'm always willing to help people with situations like that that, because a lot of times it's a situation where there's a lot of naivete when it comes to compliance or just not a lot of awareness, and so I kind of feel a burden to do that. So it was a natural fit for me.

Noah Bolmer:

Yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned wanting to help people in the public service as an expert witness. What is important vis-a-vis helping people? In other words, what do expert witnesses do that is good for humanity overall, or jurisprudence generally? Why are expert witnesses important?

Benjamin Mink:

Yeah, that's a fantastic question and the reality is, I think, that they're critically important because both sides of a case have a story and both have facts and a lot of times if you look at one set of facts in a vacuum, you're not really getting the accurate picture of what's really happened in that case.

Benjamin Mink:

You know the plaintiff's job is to say, hey, this organization or this individual did all these things wrong. And then it's the defense's opportunity to come back and say, well, we didn't do all these things wrong, and perhaps you know there were some things that were done wrong in the process, or some of what the plaintiff says is factually accurate, accurate. And so it's really important from a fairness perspective, even just from a societal standpoint and ensuring that cases have a relatively fair outcome, that both sides of the story are told to the jury so that they can get a truly accurate picture as to what happened. And so I really take a lot of pleasure in being able to do that. And that's where I think, you know, a good expert isn't necessarily an encyclopedia, it's a good translator, somebody that can break it down to a jury to the point that it's easy to understand what happened or what was supposed to happen.

Noah Bolmer:

As an expert, you know you're often inundated with all kinds of technical speak and legal speak. When it comes time to translating some of this for the fact finder, be it a jury or a judge, or even write it in an expert witness report, how do you break these potentially complex topics down so that they are more understandable?

Benjamin Mink:

Yeah, also a great question. The reality is that I've done this for a while now, and so it gets easier, almost like secondhand, for me to be able to do it at this juncture Now. Starting out, that wasn't the case. I realized really early on that I was doing a great job of retaining and explaining the information at a high level in a technical way, but it wasn't really as beneficial as it should have been, because I didn't understand at that time that my job was to be a translator. I thought I was just there to kind of be the knowledge guy, like hey, this is what's supposed to happen and this is how that plays out.

Benjamin Mink:

But being able to break that down for anyone to be able to understand is really really critically important. And so I try to put myself in the shoes of a jury member and I say you know what, if I was on the jury, how would this make sense to me? What's the easiest way to explain this so that I could understand it if I didn't have the technical knowledge that I do have? And so I think that's a really important thing is is being able to just understand that if you you speak in the technical language to someone that doesn't understand. They're not going to understand it.

Noah Bolmer:

So you bring up jury trials, how do you get ready for it? So I've had expert witnesses say you know I like to cram everything the morning of and make sure that it's fresh in my head, or I drink a ton of coffee and do yoga or I fast. Do you have any pre-trial rituals or preparation techniques?

Benjamin Mink:

Yeah, I definitely don't fast.

Benjamin Mink:

I feel like I'd get low blood sugar because sometimes those run a little long and I feel like the worst thing that could happen is have your expert faint midway through a deposition.

Benjamin Mink:

So that's definitely not something that I would do.

Benjamin Mink:

But I will say, one of the greatest prep tools that I have used, and something that's really benefited me as an expert, is I try to really pay attention to past depositions and so even the fact witness depots, because if you really read those carefully, you'll find certain places that the opposing counsel really focused on, and so I spend a fair amount of time when I prep expecting those focus areas to likely be the focus areas that take place in my deposition, and so that sort of helps me because, like you said, we're dealing with such a large quantity of information I mean thousands and thousands of documents, and then hours and hours of just preparation and report writing, all of these things and so you know to I would love to be able to to re-cram it all in my brain the morning of, but I don't know that I have the capacity for that.

Benjamin Mink:

So I try to just focus into thinking what, where would the opposing counsel? Where's most likely for them to go in terms of their questioning. Where are they going to head with this? And that's where I spend the most time preparing.

Noah Bolmer:

You mentioned, you know, thousands of pages of documents and tons and tons of preparation. Do you feel that attorneys could do a better job winnowing the wheat from the chaff when they are giving you the initial documentation for the case, or do you feel like it's important to have all of those documents at the ready? And when you feel like it's important to have all of those documents at the ready and when you are inundated with all of it, does that mean that you should be reading every single page of everything that comes over your desk?

Benjamin Mink:

Yeah, I mean the challenge is time, right. I mean we a lot of times you only have so much time before the report is due, so much time before the deposition is due. Uh, and so you know you would love to be able to say I can look at and retain every piece of information that they give me. And so there's a sort of a two-sided coin One. It's really great if counsel gives you anything and everything, because you know you may see something that otherwise they might have thought wasn't important, that you picked up on, that could be critically important as the expert. And so by limiting the amount of information they give you, they sort of do themselves a little bit of a disservice. But at the same time they have to be careful not to inundate you so much with so much useless information that you can't find what's critically important in the data. And so I think it is a balance, and different law firms have approached this differently.

Benjamin Mink:

I've worked with several, both big and small. Some give you information in pieces and chunks, and that works. Sometimes it's nice because you're not overwhelmed and they have some key things they want you to look at early on, which I think is a really smart way to do it, Uh, and then they continue to sort of feed you new information, as that goes. But again, that all depends on the amount of time you have, because there are instances where, uh, they've had an expert that couldn't deliver, or something went sideways, and they have a very short runway, and so there may not be much of a choice but to give you a very large quantity of files in a short amount of time.

Noah Bolmer:

Does whether or not you have what you perceive to be sufficient time factor into whether or not you decide to accept an engagement?

Benjamin Mink:

was not enough time. I'm not going to risk a Daubert claim or something like that because I'm insufficiently prepared for something and I'm not going to deliver something that's half done. As an expert, your reputation is critically important. I mean critically important. It can make or break your career as an expert. And so, as much as I would love to be able to say to every law firm that comes to me, yeah, we can take that case, there's just certain instances where I say, hey, that's not enough time, we can't, we can't do that, we can't take that sort of risk and we wouldn't risk doing your client the disservice by taking that. So and I understand there are there are rare circumstances where things happen that are outside of their control. But there's also times where I feel like, you know, maybe council was trying to save some money and this was a last minute effort and and that's just an unfortunate situation. It's one of those things that we wouldn't be the right firm because we won't. We won't take that sort of risk.

Noah Bolmer:

Have you been subject to a Dobert challenge?

Benjamin Mink:

No, I have not, and I really I think that's a testament to the fact that we myself and the people on my team we really spend the time preparing and we make sure that every T is crossed and every I is dotted. Nothing we do is fast or loose or corner cutting, and really I mean that's how we do everything in our firm, because compliance is such a critical focus point. I mean, we are, at the end of the day, we are risk managers, so if we aren't exceptional at managing the risk, then we shouldn't be here.

Noah Bolmer:

Once you've accepted an engagement, what are the factors? How do you make sure and how does the attorney ensure that it's going to be continuously a effective, efficient and productive engagement? How do you get off on the right foot and how do you maintain that momentum? Yeah, so.

Benjamin Mink:

I, I, I think that mutual trust is extremely important. Uh, and I think that begins after the, the initial introductory call, is, I think council has to have a certain level of confidence that this individual is going to deliver, they're going to be reliable, they're going to show up, they're going to be strategic, they're going to bring great insight and help us with this case. I think that first impression is really, really important and that can't be understated. And then I think you know, in terms of counsel, has to give a certain level of trust in order for that relationship to be mutually beneficial. And it's funny because you would think that maybe a lot of firms handle that the same way. It is very, very different.

Benjamin Mink:

I've had firms that are like, hey, take off and do your thing and we'll check back in in a month, and I'm like that's awesome. I mean, I love that level of trust. Then you've had others that maybe have been burned or had a bad experience, that they sort of micromanage the process and they want to have a weekly call, or maybe even more frequently than that. And you know, the reality is we accommodate either way because it's we want the client to feel comfortable with the situation, and usually even with the ones that are have a more watchful eye on the progress that trust develops. For some people it just takes a little bit longer, and so don't be surprised if you're new to this and you have a sort of a micromanagement experience, because there is a lot of pressure. There's a lot of pressure on the law firms and on the counselors there and with the client, and so I try to be understanding of that. I understand there's there's a lot that has to be accomplished and a lot riding very high stakes situation.

Noah Bolmer:

Absolutely. Are there any red flags that you look out for things that during those initial phone calls you're like boy, hey, we really, really want to?

Benjamin Mink:

engage you. We need this report in two weeks and I'm like, ah, two weeks is not a reasonable timeline for me to review this information. Another one is when there are shorter timelines, especially if a firm is not willing to pay a retainer, that creates some question for me. We're to the point now, having done this for seven years with some of the biggest firms on the planet I mean truly and even smaller firms that we request a retainer from every new client. It's just a corporate policy that we have and I think that really kicks the relationship off in the right direction.

Benjamin Mink:

We don't have to focus on immediate billing concerns. We can hit the ground running and it's a good faith thing. I mean law firms. They get retainers and so why shouldn't we? So we have turned down cases simply because the law firm and sometimes their big law firms say, well, we just don't pay retainers and that's you know. I guess if I was early on in business and I, you know, didn't have a firms that I was working with and things of that nature, maybe I would say, hey, I need to build a reputation here and then I can request retainers. But we're to the point now we've done this long enough that we request them. If somebody says no, maybe it's just not a good fit.

Noah Bolmer:

Outside of retainers. What are your other billing practices? For instance, do you do a project rate? Do you do hourly billing, and does your hourly billing change depending on the thing that you're doing, or traveling, for instance? Tell me a little bit about your billing mechanism.

Benjamin Mink:

Yeah, so our rates are consistent. I mean they change over time, as with any firm company whatever, depending on cost of living and things of that nature, but the rates don't change from case to case or depending on how complex it is or anything like that. We don't really want to inject any bias into that. We try to treat everybody fairly. The rate is just what our time is and we bill hourly with, typically, a retainer. That retainer is billed against. So we don't expect a retainer and then bill on top of it. It's just sort of to help with the initial project kickoff.

Benjamin Mink:

But we do have a different rate that's a little bit higher for our courtroom testimony and deposition time, just because that's the high stakes round. There's a lot of pressure there, there's a lot of preparation and time and expectation that goes into that and so we have to really be on our game in those situations. So those hours are more complex and difficult than even just the normal research and report writing hours where you know we're in the comfort of our offices or you know at home working on these things. So it's definitely a different situation where you don't have cameras and people you know recording and documenting everything you're doing. So I think that's pretty standard. We don't have anything that's too unique there, but, like I said, I think that has worked well for us and we've never had any issues. We bill at the end of the month, usually through an expert search firm like Roundtable Group, and they're pretty good about making sure that their experts get paid timely, and so I I appreciate that certainly.

Noah Bolmer:

Speaking of Roundtable Group, have you had luck? Do you do you find uh expert witness referral services to be useful in your practice?

Benjamin Mink:

Yes, very, very much so. They certainly have relationships with law firms and they have brought me. The majority of my expert work has come from expert search firms different too and how they process it and what that looks like, how it unfolds and when the introductions are made to council and how many people they refer. And so I would say that no two are exactly the same, but they don't operate so different from one another that it's not somewhat predictable in terms of process. But they have relationships in the network and they do a great job of facilitating communication and making sure everybody's happy in the process and I think they're really important component of of that relationship.

Noah Bolmer:

Earlier you had mentioned doing things in the comfort of your own home, which brings me to a question about telepresence. In Zoom, have you done a fair amount of talking over the proverbial phone to your attorney and perhaps even being involved in actions that take place virtually like virtual depositions. Now I've seen there's even full virtual trials on occasion. Have you experienced both and, if so, what are some of the differences for an expert witness in appearing through telepresence and being there in person?

Benjamin Mink:

Yeah, so it's certainly much more convenient. I will say that I have done virtual depositions, I've done virtual mock trials, certainly communicate regularly with the law firms we work with over Zoom or Teams or whatever the case may be, occasionally phone if it's something quick and easy that we, you know, I have a question about or I need a document or something. I can't find something, so that's not really abnormal. But early on, when I started everything even though we were pretty digital I think this is the post-COVID era where everything is kind of going digital I went to the courtroom, I went to the law firm for deposition change.

Benjamin Mink:

It's certainly more convenient, but there are some things that change, like, for example, you know, the, the prep that takes place, uh, in your office or wherever you're recording your deposition, to make sure you don't have, you know, distracting photographs on the wall or things of that nature. It's not cluttery because you want to have a professional appearance for the court and for the jury, and so there are some things that are a little bit different, that you didn't have to do in the past. You just normally walked into the law firm and you went into their conference room or some mutual meeting place and that's how you did your deposition. So it definitely has changed, but I think some of it's for the better.

Noah Bolmer:

Do you find that it's difficult to maintain?

Benjamin Mink:

eye contact when you know, obviously, on something like zoom, eye contact is the camera uh and you know, knowing where to look and how to present yourself, or do you find it pretty intuitive?

Benjamin Mink:

That's a good question. Yeah, it can be a little challenging because I think our inclination is to look at the person on the screen, which sort of has your eyes looking down. So and and I'm guilty of that regularly so what I, what I try to do is, especially when I'm making a, a, uh, some sort of critical communication or something I really want to hit home with the jury or the judge is I make a conscious effort to look directly into the camera when I'm talking about something that, let's say, the rubber hits the road here. This is something that's a really critical thing that I want you to take away from this message. I make it a point to look into the camera at that moment in time, and the rest of that time I don't spend too much energy focusing on am I staring directly at the camera? Because, in reality, the answers are really important. So I want to make sure that, first and foremost, I'm being accurate in how I'm answering.

Noah Bolmer:

Yeah, absolutely. Uh, let's talk about some of your tent pole cases, if you can, obviously, uh, you know you can leave out any details that you are not able or obliged to talk about, but are there a couple of cases that either change something about the way that you go about expert witnessing or reinforce something that you were already doing. Tell me a little bit about the your tent pole cases thing that you were already doing.

Benjamin Mink:

Tell me a little bit about your tentpole case. Fantastic question. Yeah, in a case I had early on, I was sitting in the deposition and the plaintiff's attorney asked a question that was way out in left field and in that moment my heart sort of sunk. I didn't have the perfect answer at the ready and up until that time I felt like I was hitting every ball out of the ballpark, and so I just paused for a moment and applied some critical thinking to what the best way to answer this is, and I just came to the conclusion that honesty was the best approach to this. I mean, I figured you know I didn't.

Benjamin Mink:

The reality was I didn't know the answer in the moment, so I just said, hey, I don't know this, without reviewing the data. But here is what I do know, and what I learned from that was the credibility doesn't come from having every answer, it comes from honesty and integrity under pressure. It comes from honesty and integrity under pressure, and I think that was really a defining moment for me, because it's something I carried into future depositions and I realized that, you know, a jury member isn't necessarily looking for you to know every single answer Because you know first of all, if that's the case, that's wild in terms of being something that would be normal or typical, because you just don't know what to expect and nobody knows everything I mean that's impossible to achieve. So I think, at the end of the day, they really appreciate the integrity and the honesty and the ability to say, hey, I don't know that or I need to review that, but here's what I do know.

Noah Bolmer:

Sometimes expert witnesses get engaged and they end up being part of a larger trial team. There might be other expert witnesses, there might be paralegals, there might be assistants. There might even be other attorneys that you're working with. Where does the expert witness fit into this cast of characters, and to what extent do you interact with the others?

Benjamin Mink:

Yeah, so I, I can, uh, I I'm working with a firm on on a case right now that they have a very uh large number of people that are involved.

Benjamin Mink:

The firm is very big and they have partner firms or sister firms that are involved as well, as you know, paralegals and all these other folks that are helping particular component and I communicate to their handful of attorneys, but there might be 25, 30 plus attorneys from all over the country sitting in on the meeting and so most of the time I feel like I'm doing the majority of the talking on those calls, which I guess that's what I'm there to do as the expert, but there are some moments of awkward silence occasionally.

Benjamin Mink:

Yeah, it's challenging to figure out who you're supposed to communicate with, but I think that the best way to view it is I always call it the KISS method, keep it simple, stupid, and I just communicate with the people that are communicating directly with me and I'm very careful about if a paralegal sends me something or sending me documentation. I don't ever send a communication to a paralegal requesting anything. It's always directly to my point of contact attorney, for just confidentiality purposes, just to make sure that you know that that information is maintained in a very confidential way, and I'm not communicating something to a person I shouldn't be so. Just keep it simple, as as an expert, and you'll you'll be all right.

Noah Bolmer:

Have you been involved in actions in a variety of venues, for instance, state versus federal, criminal versus tort, and if so, so how are some of these venues different for an expert witness to work?

Benjamin Mink:

yeah, so the the the interesting thing is it's not necessarily the that the venues are extraordinarily different. It's more so that the the timelines are very different on how the things are scheduled and and in what order they take place. And that's honestly one of the biggest challenges, I think, as an expert, is to get communication from counsel on timelines. I think we spend so much time communicating to one another. It's almost like you end up becoming a part of the team. It's almost like you're you end up becoming a part of the team and we just assume everybody knows everything that's happening in terms of timeline, like, hey, there's a settlement discussion this week, or you know, we expect the settlement in the next two weeks, or or you know, this report is due in two weeks from now. We got an extension and and oh, we forgot to tell you that, so that that can be a little bit of a challenge.

Benjamin Mink:

And you know, if I could give another expert advice, it would be don't be afraid to ask timeline questions, even if you just frame it as for my scheduling purposes. Has anything changed with the timeline or is there any new information that you can share with me that might be helpful or beneficial as I work on this report or this research or whatever, so that you know I don't waste your time and you don't waste mine. I think that's really appreciated, and there will always be things that they can't share with you, that happen behind the scenes. As an expert, you're sort of on a need-to-know basis and you have to be okay with that. You're not directly interfacing with the client and have the same responsibilities, so just work well with your team and I think communication is an important part of that.

Noah Bolmer:

Do you have any other last advice before we wrap up, for either expert witnesses or even attorneys who are working with experts?

Benjamin Mink:

I think that the best advice I could give really even both attorneys and experts would be to listen. You know a lot of people we all hear. The majority of us hear and we can hear what information is being given to us, but what's made me successful as an expert is my ability to listen, because I carefully process the information, and that can really be the difference in making or breaking the case, especially in deposition, where a good attorney can frame a question to get the desired outcome that he or she is looking for, the desired answer. If you just listen very carefully, you will save yourself, you will save the law firm and their client a lot of difficulty and challenge simply by listening. And so I think it's good advice for attorneys as well. If they listen carefully to their experts and the experts listen carefully to them. Everybody learns and becomes better simply by listening.

Noah Bolmer:

Absolutely sage advice. Mr Mink, thank you so much for joining me here today. Thank you, noah, I appreciate it, and thank you, as always, to our listeners for joining us for another edition of Engaging Experts Cheers.

Benjamin Mink:

Thank you for listening to our podcast Engaging Experts. Our show notes are available on our website roundtablegroupcom.