The Expert Record: The Standard for Expert Witnesses Using AI

Show me your prompts.

The question is already ordinary. Within a few years, every expert witness in the country will be asked it, and the answer will have almost nothing to do with technology.

Artificial intelligence did not create a new way for an expert to be wrong. It created a new record of how the expert got there: complete, timestamped, verbatim, held by someone else, and increasingly producible in discovery. That record exists whether or not you manage it. The only question is whether it would survive being read aloud in a deposition or in front of a jury.

The Expert Record is neither a warning against artificial intelligence systems nor a case for them. It is a working method, drawn from the way careful professionals in every discipline have always protected their independence. At its center is The Expert Record Standard: eight clauses that fit on a single page, written so they can be lifted verbatim into an engagement letter or a firm policy.

The Standard rests on one governing test. An engagement satisfies it when a competent examiner in the same field, working only from the primary sources and with no access to any artificial intelligence system, could reproduce the expert's result. Every chapter that follows explains how to meet that test in practice, from the day of retention to the last question at deposition.

Inside, you will find:

The Expert Record Standard, eight clauses on one page, licensed for adoption with attribution.

A green, yellow, and red task taxonomy that tells you which work can be assisted by artificial intelligence, which work requires verification, and which work must never be delegated.

A six-step examination method for data productions too large to read, built on reproducible scripts rather than conversations with a chatbot.

The verification pass, the independent-source rule, and the contemporaneous log that proves your method after the fact.

A full treatment of discovery: what is protected, what is not, how to preserve the record, and how to produce it when asked.

A chapter on the deposition itself, and on answering the question on the cover with confidence.

Four chapters written for counsel, covering how to vet an expert's use of artificial intelligence at retention and how to examine the other side's expert.

Nine appendices you can use tomorrow, including an AI-use log template, engagement letter provisions, a verification checklist, deposition question sets for both sides, and a preservation and production protocol.

The book is written for expert witnesses in every field, including engineering, medicine, appraisal, forensic accounting, economics, and digital forensics. It is written for the attorneys who retain and examine them. And it is written for any professional whose signed work could one day become an exhibit.

Bill Hartzer has been retained as an expert witness in litigation involving search engine optimization, online advertising, web analytics, social media, online reputation, and domain names. He wrote this book the same way he asks you to work: with a contemporaneous record of his own use of artificial intelligence, published in the appendix.

When opposing counsel asks to see your prompts, the right answer is simple: Certainly. Here is the entire record.