This is a big month for expert witness investigation.

What's new is an intuitive, user-friendly presentation: West's Expert Investigation reports display a wealth of information about experts in easy-to-read tables, dramatically shortening your expert research time.

A few seconds is all it takes to learn nuggets such as the following:

• This expert typically works for the plaintiff.
• This expert appeared in litigation at least 35 times between 2003 and 2008.
• This expert testified several times in out-of-state courts.
• This expert was retained by several named attorneys, whom you can call for references.
• This expert testified in at least 15 cases in which $100,000 to $999,999 was awarded.
• The admissibility of this expert's testimony was challenged six times (two times successfully).
• This expert's testimony has twice been excluded by the judge assigned to your case.
• Other experts in the same field have testified in more cases but were mostly involved in cases with smaller awards.

Even on Westlaw, it used to take many searches—and considerable reading—to gather all of this information. Now, with minimal searching, you can retrieve an Expert Evaluator report, Expert Comparison report, and Expert Challenge report that summarize this information for you in compact, easy-to-view tables.

In addition, if you want to review specific documents cited in a table, links to all cited full-text documents are displayed on a single page. You can also view or print, on a single page, a complete Expert Appearances list (which contains links to opinions, jury verdict and settlement summaries, and dockets) or Expert Document list (which contains links to expert testimony, briefs, and motions).

How to access: Links to search pages for all three report types are displayed on the Westlaw site map; on the tabbed Expert, Litigation, and State Litigation pages; and in the left frame of jury verdict and settlement summary documents. Links to reports for a specific expert may be displayed in the expert's Westlaw Profiler document.

Here's what the reports contain:

Expert Evaluator report: A year-by-year summary of a particular expert's litigation experience. It includes an appearance summary, roles (e.g., expert for plaintiff), number of available trial and testimony documents, names of attorneys who retained the expert, specific parties who retained the expert, names of presiding judges, case types, and damages awards. The easy-to-use search template allows you to search by name, area of expertise, or both.

Expert Comparison report: A convenient table that compares the credentials and litigation experience (using the same criteria as in the Expert Evaluator report) of up to three experts in a side-by-side table. The search template allows you to run state-specific searches by area of expertise or by expert name.

Expert Challenge report: A summary of court challenges to an expert's testimony, including the name of the case, judge, court, and attorneys, as well as the result of the challenge, e.g., Excluded. You can also retrieve Expert Challenge reports for a particular judge to learn the judge's approach to particular witnesses or types of witnesses.