A.I. Assisted, Independently Verifiable.

Complex Civil Litigation Support with an Emphasis on Birth Injury, Medical Malpractice & Other Healthcare Related Disputes.Fifteen Years Working with a Pediatric Neurologist Expert Witness on Birth Injury Cases, Through August 2026.Affordable Case Deliverables for Litigators and Expert Witnesses.Medical Expert Witness Identification & Vetting. Nothing Owed Unless You Retain an Expert I Found.

$1.00 a Page

$0.50 above 10,000 pages. $500 minimum.

48 Hours

Standard delivery. Rush is same business day.

Same Day

Initial response.

First 500 Pages Free

Initial engagements. No minimum.

See the Samples Start a Matter Upload Files and/or Folders

Trust but Verify, and Never be Outworked.

For Litigators

Every matter opens with one PDF:

A chronology and cited case file
Answers to a standard set of questions for the case type
Records to request, with draft request letters
A medical specials schedule

Litigator Services & Pricing

For Expert Witnesses

Your own records, organized and verifiable:

A testimony list, built and kept current
A qualifications self-audit
A case file register and materials-considered list
A citation audit of your draft report

Expert Witness Services & Pricing

Click the Citation. Read the Page.

Two entries from the sample medical summary. Every name and record in it is invented.

Two summary entries. The second, 06/14/2025 14:14, reads: First page to the obstetrician. Second page at 14:22. No documented response to the first page. It cites Mother-Riverbend p.4.

Open Mother-Riverbend p.4Close the page

The cited page, Mother-Riverbend p.4. Under Communication and Interventions Documented: 14:14 Page placed to Dr. Etchegaray. 14:22 Second page placed to Dr. Etchegaray. No documented response to the first page.

The cited page. In the PDF the citation is a live link, and this is the page it opens.

Open the Full Sample All Samples

What I Do

Litigation Support for Attorneys & Expert Witnesses

I make sense of your case-related source records. The core product is a hyperlinked document chronology, whereby every relevant fact is instantly verifiable.

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I also produce supporting analyses with regard to motion practice and report drafting, as well as live proceeding preparation. I take on any civil litigation matter where the answer is somewhere in the documents. The emphasis is birth injury and medical malpractice first, then nursing home and elder abuse, toxic exposure, product liability and serious personal injury. Those are the cases won or lost on what the documents actually say, and on whether anyone has read them.

Medical Expert Witness Identification & Vetting for Litigators

Finding the right medical expert and confirming they will hold up before you retain them.

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The work starts by matching the medical question to the correct subspecialty, then confirming the physician actually holds the relevant board certification, maintains current clinical practice in that field, and has the requisite experience as a testifying witness to credibly make your case. Prior transcripts, malpractice history, license discipline, and any pattern of contradictory opinions or a reputation as a hired gun are some of the variables involved. I also research conflicts, availability, fee expectations, and how the expert is likely to come across to a jury. A poorly chosen expert can be worse than none at all, whether in the form of wilting under cross-examination or facing a Daubert challenge. This service exists to surface such issues during the selection period, as opposed to after a given medical expert is retained.

Why Work with Me

Priced Before Work Begins.

Every engagement is priced before work begins. No hourly billing. No scope creep. No invoice surprises.

A.I. Assisted. Independently Verifiable.

Advanced A.I. workflows handle the volume. Both handwritten and typed text are captured. Every deliverable is linked back to the source record from which it was derived. Any fact in it can be checked against the page it came from. That is what makes the work verifiable rather than merely asserted.

Your Deadline Is My Deadline.

Standard delivery: 48 hours. Rush delivery: same business day. My workflow is bound by one constraint. Yours.

Nothing new to learn. No portal, login, proprietary software, subscription, or long-term commitment. Access my work product on an as-needed basis the minute it arrives via PDF, MS Word and Excel software you already know how to use. The hyperlinked source page citations travel inside a self-contained PDF so they always work, whether you're online or not.

Your work is deadline driven. I understand that, and therefore give same-day answers to any and all communications. Standard delivery is 48 hours. Rush is same business day. And in any event, turnaround times are always clearly defined.

Thirty days after you tell me the matter is closed, I destroy your records and my working files and send you a signed certificate of destruction.

Ready to Move Your Case Forward?

Send me the matter details and a page count estimate. I respond the same day. Rush engagements confirmed and scoped within hours.

Get in Touch

Simple Pricing

$1.00 per page

$0.50 per page above 10,000 pages in a matter
$500 minimum per matter
Your first 500 pages at no charge on an initial engagement
Every analysis a page supports is included. No page is charged twice.

One Dollar per Each Page Received. Everything Included.

Send a record through once and every analysis it can produce is included, and you are never charged twice for the same page.

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You pay $1.00 for each page you send me. Above 10,000 pages in a matter, every subsequent page received is $0.50. The only thing that adds to the total is new pages, like a later deposition transcript or a supplemental production. No hourly billing. No estimates. No surprises.

Initial Core Deliverable. Every matter opens with a single PDF deliverable, which includes a chronology and cited case file, answers to a standard set of questions per case type, records to request with draft request letters based on a gap analysis, and a medical specials schedule.

You Don't Have to Know What You Need

Many clients don't at the outset, and that is fine.

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Because I charge by the page and not by the deliverable, I can look at your records and tell you what they will actually support, whether a chronology, a gap analysis, or an impeachment angle you had not spotted, at no extra cost. When I recommend a line of work, it is because it helps your case, not my invoice.

One page can become any of the following, all included in the rate:

Record Analysis

From your records:

Chronological medical record summaries with citations to the source page
Hyperlinked case files that bundle every cited source page into one document
Source citation verification
Records gap analysis with supplemental request letters
Case chronologies, timelines, and issue identification
Medical specials schedules: billed, paid, adjusted and owed, line by line, each figure linked to the bill, EOB or lien letter it came from
Life care plan traceability: every plan item traced to the recommendation or record behind it, or flagged where none was located in what you sent
Medical literature packets: what the published studies say on your question, quoted and linked, included with a records order

Deposition Analysis

From a transcript:

Deposition breakdowns and testimony analysis
Impeachment worksheets
Cross-examination outlines

Production & Disclosure

On a produced set:

Bates numbering and production set preparation
Confidentiality designations under the protective order
Exhibit and record indexing for deposition and trial
Records inventories for expert reports and Rule 26 disclosures, with a materials-considered list the expert adopts
Case materials assembled and transmitted to your retained expert
EHR audit trails reconciled to the chart, with entries flagged against the parameters you set, as a first pass for your forensic expert
Production gap matrices: each request against what was actually produced, account by account and month by month

Demonstrative Exhibits

Upon request, and at no charge beyond the dollar a page rate, I build the exhibits you put on the screen. In an opening. In a closing. In front of a mediator, across the table at a settlement conference, or under your expert on direct.

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Every number, time and quotation on one carries the record page it came from. Every one of those page tags is a live link. Click it and the source page opens behind the exhibit, in the same file. Print it and you still have a clean panel. Display it and you have the record behind it.

That matters for one reason. Whoever puts the exhibit up doesn't have to defend a chart. They have to say it fairly and accurately depicts the record. Then the other side can check it, in the room, without taking anyone's word for it. That holds whether the person sponsoring it is a retained expert or you.

What I won't put on an exhibit: anatomy that isn't in your films, a threshold that isn't in the chart, or a clinical standard of any kind. Those belong to the witness qualified to state them. The exhibit's job is to show what the record says, and to prove where it said it.

You get two files. The exhibit with the cited source pages bound in behind it, which is the one you display. And a clean single panel for printing or mounting. Neither carries any branding of mine.

Two samples are on the samples page. They look nothing alike, which is deliberate. See the two exhibits.

There is no separate charge for this. Exhibits are rolled into the $1.00 per page rate. If I've read your records at a dollar a page, the exhibits built off those records are another deliverable off the same reading. Not a second invoice. Not an add on. Not a line item.

Specialized Analyses

Each is included in the $1.00 per page rate unless a fee is shown.

Fetal Monitoring Strip and Chart Timeline

Labor and delivery cases hinge on two records: the fetal monitor strip and the chart nurses kept while it ran.

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I line them up in 15-minute windows. You see what the strip prints, what was charted, the oxytocin rate in effect and every call and order, each linked to its page.

I measure the gap between the monitor clock and the chart clock. It's rarely zero. The tracing is read by the credentialed reviewer you retain, in a column left for them. I don't interpret strips.

Included in the $1.00 per page rate. The strip and the chart are pages like any others.

See the sample timeline.

Two-Sided Record Analysis

You frame the issues. For each one I set out the record entries your side can cite, the entries the other side will cite, what the record doesn't contain and the questions to put to your expert.

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Every entry is quoted and linked to its page.

The layout is the same whichever side you represent. Your expert gets a sorted record on day one. It isn't an opinion on the case. Opinions belong to your expert and to you.

Included in the $1.00 per page rate. If I've already read the record, it's another deliverable off the same reading. Not a second invoice.

See the sample analysis.

Inpatient Score and Sepsis Clock

Hospital cases often hinge on when someone should have noticed.

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I recompute the published early warning scores, NEWS2, MEWS, qSOFA and SIRS, hour by hour from the vital signs as charted, and set them beside whatever score the hospital's own system displayed. I find the CMS sepsis "time zero" under the specifications manual in force on the date of care and time every bundle element from it. Every number links to its page.

What a score required anyone to do is for your expert.

Included in the $1.00 per page rate.

See the sample.

Labor and Delivery Trigger Table

Every set of the mother's charted vital signs, checked against the published criteria: the Maternal Early Warning Criteria, ACOG's and AIM's severe-hypertension definitions and treatment clocks, and the CMS sepsis criteria for pregnancy.

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You see which criteria were met, when, and the next documented call to the provider. It runs on the same clock as the Fetal Monitoring Strip and Chart Timeline.

Included in the $1.00 per page rate.

See the sample.

Neonatal Calculator Replay and Cord Gas Check

The baby's chart values run through the published tools, in each version that could have applied that day: both Kaiser Permanente early-onset sepsis models and the AAP 2022 bilirubin tables.

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Cord gases are recomputed and checked against a published pairing rule, which can show samples that were labeled backwards. You get what each tool returns for the cited inputs. What that meant for care is for your expert.

Included in the $1.00 per page rate.

See the sample.

Serial Imaging Tracker and Read-Time Concordance

Delayed-diagnosis cases turn on what each report said and when.

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I follow one finding through every imaging report in the record: the words used, the size given, any follow-up the report recommended, and when the next comparable study was done. For a single study I line up order, scan, preliminary read, final signature and the critical-result call against the hospital's own written policy. Every entry links to its page.

I don't read images. Whether a change mattered is for your radiologist.

Included in the $1.00 per page rate.

See the sample.

Life Care Plan Code Crosswalk and Cost Refresh

For each line of a life care plan, I show the billing code it was priced with and whether any record page prints that code or the planner chose it.

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Then I set the plan's unit cost beside the current public figure for the same code, from the CMS fee schedules, Medicaid drug cost data and BLS wage tables, with the file, edition and date it was read.

I don't choose codes or figures, and I don't total anything. That's for the planner and the economist.

Included in the $1.00 per page rate.

See the sample.

Life Expectancy Inputs Abstract

The published life expectancy tables for cerebral palsy and spinal cord injury key on a handful of facts.

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I quote every record entry that bears on them, flag the ones that point different ways, and lay out where the two sides' experts coded the same person differently. Then I show what the current table prints for each coding. None is chosen.

I don't estimate life expectancy. That's for your expert.

Included in the $1.00 per page rate.

See the sample.

Public-Record Profiles

Before the records arrive. Send me a nursing home's name and the resident's dates of stay.

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I pull what the federal government already publishes: daily nurse staffing by quarter against its own expected hours, with the stay marked, plus survey deficiencies, penalties, star ratings and the ownership chain. Every figure cites the dataset, its public address and the date I pulled it. It won't say that staffing caused anything. That's for your experts.

$500 per facility. $250 for each added facility in the same ownership chain.

See the sample profile.

Expert Report Citation Audit

Courts have excluded expert opinions because the underlying report cited articles that don't exist.

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Send me the report, its reference list and the records it cites. I check every citation: does the source exist, do the author, year and journal match, and does it say what the report says it says? I check every record cite against its page. Where the expert has spoken to the same point before, whether in a published opinion or article, I set it beside the report. You get a register with a status and a link for every citation. I don't say whether the opinions are right. Testifying experts can send their own draft before it's served. More for experts on the Experts page.

$500 flat per report, up to 50 references and 100 record cites. $10 for each added reference.

See the sample audit.

Fixed Fees

A few services are priced as flat fees, not per page:

Service	Fee
Medical expert identification & vetting (finder's fee, payable only if the expert is retained)	$1,000
Pre-Suit Record Screen (72-hour turnaround) The record screen is meant to run early, before a matter has taken on cost you can't get back. It tells you what the record supports and what it lacks. Whether that's a case is your call, and you'll be making it before you've spent much time or money finding out.	$500
Public-record profile, per nursing home ($250 for each added facility in the same ownership chain)	$500
Expert report citation audit, per report, up to 50 references and 100 record cites ($10 for each added reference)	$500
Testimony list for a testifying expert, built from the expert's own records ($150 a year to keep it current)	$350
Qualifications self-audit for a testifying expert ($150 a year to refresh it)	$350
Case file register on its own (included with any per-page record order)	$150
Deposition errata transcription check (included when I did the record work)	$150
Ongoing case coordination	$1,000 / month

Standard Terms

$1.00 per page to 10,000 pages in a matter, then $0.50 per page. $500 minimum per matter. With regard to initial client engagements, your first 500 pages are processed at no charge (no minimum). 50% to start, balance due on delivery. Same business day rush: add 50%. A "page" means one page of a document you send me for analysis. My own work product does not count toward your total. Work product goes out with no letterhead or branding of mine. If you'd like your firm's letterhead on it, send it along with the records and I'll add it at no charge.

About

This is a solo litigation support practice built on 30 years of complex litigation support experience and the systematic application of advanced A.I. workflows to case documentation. You hire me, and I do the work.

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I work exclusively in civil litigation. That focus is deliberate. Every tool, every workflow, and every service I offer is designed for the specific demands of active case preparation, ranging from clerical to substantive and all points in between.

The practice specializes in medical-legal matters. Birth injury is the deepest part of that work, hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy in particular. It also covers medical malpractice generally, nursing home and elder abuse, toxic exposure, product liability, and serious personal injury. I also screen records before suit, and tell you what they support and what they lack. With regard to the clinical judgment questions, I assemble the record evidence against each of them and attach no opinion, because that's a job for a retained expert, not me. More broadly, I'll take on just about any document-intensive civil litigation matter up to roughly 100,000 pages. The work sits best between about 1,000 and 50,000 pages. Above 100,000 I'd point you to an e-discovery vendor rather than take a matter I can't do properly.

With respect to medical malpractice and other healthcare related litigation, I organize the record around the three issues your case turns on: standard of care, causation, and damages. For each, I show you where the record speaks and where it is silent, with a citation to every page. The opinions on those issues are your experts'. My job is making sure nothing in the record that bears on them gets missed.

I combine A.I. assisted document workflows with experienced litigation judgment. The A.I. handles volume. The judgment handles everything that actually matters: what's clinically significant, what's missing, what contradicts the opposing expert, what the timeline really shows. Every deliverable goes out with its citations in place, so nothing in it has to be taken on trust. The result is work product that arrives faster and holds up better under scrutiny, at a price set before I start.

The Buck Stops Here

My name is David A. Black, and I have worked in complex litigation support for 30 years. Earlier in that run I was a Senior IP Paralegal Specialist and Electronic Evidence Liaison at the San Francisco and Palo Alto offices of Cooley Godward LLP (now Cooley LLP) and Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich (now DLA Piper). I was also a project manager at OnPoint Analytics, a small Bay Area firm specializing in data analysis for testifying economists in high-stakes litigation in the early 2000s.

From 2020 through June 2026 I ran MedLegal Network, a medical expert witness vendor serving clients nationwide. For 15 years, through August 2026, I worked very closely with a child neurology medical expert witness who testifies nationwide.

I earned a BA in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego, a master's in English Literature from San Francisco State University, and a California public school teaching credential from the University of San Francisco. I taught middle school in San Francisco as a young man.

A Word About Artificial Intelligence and the Practice of Law

Reputable artificial intelligence products are, with very few exceptions, incredible at getting much of your work done competently in a fraction of the time it takes a human being to do so. They read thousands of pages without tiring. They find the one lab value buried deep in a record. They draft a chronology in hours. I therefore use such tools daily and don't mind saying so.

Moreover, A.I. is evolving rapidly. What a model or agentic process could not do in January it does by June. Anything anyone tells you about their limits has a short shelf life. I re-test my own workflows as the tools change, because a method that was sound a year ago may now be obsolete.

Having said this, they are not infallible. And their perfection will likely never be achieved. A model can produce a citation to a source that does not exist. It can attribute a finding to the wrong date, the wrong physician, or a page that says something else entirely. It does this in fluent, confident prose that reads exactly like the right answer. Expert declarations have already been thrown out because the citations in them were invented by a model. Fluency is not accuracy. Linking A.I. claims to their corresponding source files, however, serves to catch the technology's imperfection.

This is why verification is not an option with respect to my work. It's a requirement. Every fact in a deliverable carries a citation to the source page from which it came, and where the work calls for it I bundle those cited pages into the deliverable itself. That turns what would otherwise be a mere assertion into a substantiated record. You do not have to take my word for any of it, and you do not have to take the machine's. You can click the citation and read the page.

I would never ask a client to accept work product generated by artificial intelligence without source file verification. Neither should you.

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If A.I. technology reviews the records, what value do you bring to the process? A fair question, and I would rather answer it than have you wonder.

Deciding what to ask. The technology does not know which facts matter in your case, which gap in a chart is routine and which one is the case, or what the opposing expert is going to lean on. It cannot know. It has never met your file.

It also does not know where its own competence ends. It does not slow down, hedge, or flag the moment it crosses from something it handles well into something it does not. It produces the same confident prose either way. Knowing roughly where that line falls in a set of medical records is not a feature of the software. It is thirty years of reading medical records.

Consider what has happened in law specifically. A Stanford study published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies tested the leading commercial A.I. legal research products, the purpose-built ones sold to firms as the safe option. They produced incorrect or unsupported statements between 17 and 33 percent of the time, while being marketed as hallucination-free. If the tools built specifically for this still need someone checking them, so does everything else.

There is a line going around that the rise of artificial intelligence has effectively resulted in English majors' vindication. It is closer to true than it sounds. What these systems give back is governed by the precision of what you put in, and precision with language is a trained skill rather than a knack. In a controlled study, professionals and non-professionals were given the identical tool, the identical time limit and the identical task. The professionals got measurably better results because A.I.'s output is only as good as its input prompts.

Precision buys a second thing. The same records can be written up for a jury, for a lawyer, or for a physician, and those are three different documents. A juror needs the story in plain language. A litigator needs the timeline, the intervals and the gaps. Your retained expert needs the clinical detail and the citation behind every line. Tell me who is going to read it and what they need to do with it. That is the level I write to.

So, no. I am not a potted plant standing next to a machine that does the work. I decide what to ask. I decide what matters and what does not. And every answer comes back tied to the page it came from, so that you never have to take either of us on faith.

Contact

Start a matter. Tell me what you have and what you need. It takes about two minutes and I will come back with a fixed price and a delivery date. Give my work a try for free. I'll process your first 500 pages at no charge. Do not send records through the form. Records come later, through a secure link.

Start a Matter

Upload documents, imaging, and other case media here. Transfers are end-to-end encrypted, covered by a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement, and handled under your protective order. No account or sign-in required.

Transmit your records to me electronically. I do not accept any media in hard-copy format, though a USB drive can be arranged if the volume requires it. If your records are on paper, your copy service or scanning vendor can deliver them to my secure upload link in PDF format.

Upload Files and/or Folders

Send me the matter, the service you need, and an estimated page count. I respond the same day. Rush engagements are confirmed and scoped within hours.

[email protected] 510-990-5636

Same day response. Rush engagements confirmed within hours.