This Directory contains over 1,600 expert witnesses indexed by over 23,000 categories – or different areas of expertise!  Most are located in the U.S. but some are in Canada.  I thought to give you a sampling of the categories but picking something representative seems impossible.  You can check them out at www.seakexperts.com

The experts are listed alphabetically by state, province and name.  Their names are given, location, telephone number, often enough a website. area(s) of expertise, number of times deposed/testified in the last 4 years, education/qualifications and years in practice.

SEAK, Inc. is a U.S. based expert witness training company in business for at least 30 years.  Their literature indicates they have trained thousands of expert witnesses through seminars, conferences, on-site corporate training, and by working one-on-one with individual experts.  The training is hands-on and covers areas such as report writing, depositions, direct examinations, cross examinations and ethics.

I attended one of their conferences and a workshop another year.  They are good and well organized.  I also have several of their books including both on expert report writing which are excellent.

It’s interesting, that while a number of their books are on testifying and cross examination, they list training in report writing first.  As adversarial as the U.S. seems, the great majority of disputes are settled out of court, and I’m sure this due in no small measure to good expert report writing..

You might take a look at their website.  While most of the claims and dispute resolution in the Atlantic provinces doesn’t need highly specialized experts from away, it’s nice to know the resource is there.  I could have used an expert in the design and manufacture of a power tool recently – and the expertise is listed in the SEAK directory – but my preliminary work saw the direction the investigation was going and that was enough.

(Posted by Eric E. Jorden, M.Sc., P.Eng. Consulting Professional Engineer, Forensic Engineer, Geotechnology Ltd., Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada November 30, 2017 ejorden@eastlink.ca)