Nancy: Could you explain what Kalivar.com is and does?

Mark: Kalivar.com is an online medical-legal "marketplace" that connects attorneys with expert witness services.

Kalivar was created by a lawyer and two physicians with extensive experience in the medical legal business. They realized that the model providing expert witness services had a lot of room for growth, given technological advances since the 1970's. They realized it is an industry ripe for an upgrade.

Nancy: How do attorneys benefit from using Kalivar.com?

Mark: Attorneys can receive opinions about a case from multiple clinicians and provide consensus as to whether the case has merit or not. Even better, by providing multiple opinions the attorney will also gain input into how other potential clinical expert witnesses may think and view the case. With that information, the attorney can plan his or her arguments in advance. Finally, and the icing on the cake, the platform is very affordable.

Nancy: Why is a platform like Kalivar.com needed?

Mark: To appreciate how inefficient the medical legal industry is, you first need to understand how a medical malpractice lawsuit starts. If you are a patient, and you believe that you have been the victim of medical negligence, you typically will go to an attorney and ask them to represent you. Of course, attorneys are not medical professionals, and typically have no idea of whether a specific case would fall outside the acceptable "standards of care". From our experience, when something bad happens to a patient, it's generally an unfortunate event, not medical negligence.

But medical malpractice and personal injury attorneys need to investigate and find out if they have a valid case to pursue further - this is what they do. So, they will need to retain a physician with expertise in the field and ask them to review the pertinent medical records and formulate an opinion on whether the patient was treated according to the acceptable standards of care. But that is not enough ... even if there was negligence, attorneys have to prove that that negligence resulted in damage to the patient - that is, there was causation. This is even more difficult to prove and may require that an additional clinical expert is retained for a review of the records.

Nancy: Wow, this can be become quite complicated. What happens next?

Mark: Let me give you an example which may illustrate the situation more clearly. Lets take the case where a radiologist missed a diagnosis of cancer when reading a CT scan. First, the attorney has to find a radiology expert to verify that the defendant radiologist was negligent in not diagnosing a cancer. Next, the attorney will need to retain an oncologist to confirm that that delay in diagnosis has resulted in a worse prognosis meaning that the negligence has resulted in causation. Unless both experts agree that there has been both negligence and causation, the attorney generally has no grounds to file a claim.

Besides the extensive time spent doing this research, consulting both a radiologist AND a medical oncologist will easily cost to the attorney a few thousand dollar in consultation fees. This is a very expensive process, especially since more than 90% of the time attorneys will find out that their client was not the victim of medical negligence, and even when they were, there was no causation.

But let's say that in fact the expert or experts retained by a lawyer did find merit and causation. That is only a one person's opinion. You can probably find other 100 experts with a completely different take on the case. When that single initial opinion is questionable, significant funds are further incurred unnecessarily in legal cases to provide support to the initial opinion which adds to the cost. Most of the times attorneys do not have a network of physicians they can reach out to for the proper opinion. So, in order to find the right expert, they will use expert witness services, which makes the process even more expensive! Many of those expert witness services will ask $5,000 just to connect the attorney with an expert, or mark up 30% of the expert fees.

Nancy: How does using Kalivar.com simplify the process?

Mark: Our founders thought wait a second, instead of having attorneys paying an expert for a full review why don't we create a system where attorneys can ask not one, but multiple experts about their take on a case? And most of the time you don't need to review medical records to formulate an opinion. As a doctor, most of the time you can provide an initial opinion -- just based on a good summary of a case -- whether something wrong has happened.

Of note, not only doctors, but any medical professional (such as nurses, therapists, technicians) with an NPI can serve as experts on Kalivar.

The attorney provides a set, very reasonable monetary compensation to physicians who respond either within the time period or until the number of requested responses are met.

Furthermore, in the Kalivar forum we protect the identity of our experts, and we do not disclose whether the attorney is representing the plaintiff or the defendant. From our experience, we realize that choosing sides in a dispute between a patient and a peer clinician may be uncomfortable for doctors. So, we remove that variable.

Finally, Kalivar gives attorney the opportunity to retain as an expert witness for a formal review of records any of the experts who has posted a comment on their case.

The entire process (opinions from multiple clinicians and retention of an expert witness) is very inexpensive compared to the thousands of dollars an attorney would spend if they don't use Kalivar. We are almost 100% online and have low overhead so we can charge less than traditional expert witness recruiting firms.

Nancy: What comes next?

Mark: We think Kalivar is a win-win for both attorneys and experts. Additionally, we are already working to make Kalivar the platform for any type of legal expert witness. In the near future Kalivar will offer expert witnesses in multiple fields such as engineering, accounting, intellectual property, and many more.