In this episode…

Ever wondered what happens when trees become the center of legal disputes? Marty Shaw takes us behind the scenes of his fascinating career as an arboricultural expert witness, where he serves as “the CSI of trees” for courtrooms across America.

Shaw’s journey into expert witnessing began unexpectedly while working as a wholesale distributor for tree healthcare products. A chance meeting with an established consultant opened his eyes to a profession where his specialized knowledge could help resolve conflicts and deliver justice. After attending the American Society of Consulting Arborists Academy, Shaw developed the skills to translate complex tree science into testimony that judges and juries could understand.

What makes Shaw’s expertise particularly valuable is its rarity. “There’s perhaps maybe a dozen people in the whole country that do what I do for a living,” he explains, highlighting how he’s carved out a specialized niche in arboricultural consulting. When preparing for testimony, Shaw creates detailed reports containing all his opinions and supporting documentation, helping him withstand challenges to his expertise while presenting information clearly to non-experts.

Technology has dramatically transformed Shaw’s practice over the years. As the first consulting arborist to regularly use drones, he now captures detailed site imagery that reveals critical information about tree conditions. “It’s the most profitable service that I offer and the most useful tool that I own by far,” Shaw notes, explaining how drone imagery provides evidence that would otherwise be impossible to collect.

Beyond technical expertise, Shaw emphasizes that successful expert witnessing hinges on relationships. Setting clear expectations, maintaining communication, and showing mutual gratitude form the foundation of productive attorney-expert partnerships. For those considering this career path, Shaw advises patience: “If you’re good at it, then the money will come and you’ll be able to do it full time. But it does take a while.”

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Note: Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity

Host: Noah Bolmer, Round Table Group

Guest:  Marty Shaw, Founder of Green Season Consulting

Noah Bolmer: Welcome to Engaging Experts. I’m your host, Noah Bolmer, and I’m excited to welcome Marty Shaw to the show. Mr. Shaw is the founder and owner of Green Season Consulting, a full-service arboricultural consultancy with services ranging from forensic investigations to tree value appraisal and a lot more. He’s an ISA-certified arborist, a published author, and an experienced expert witness. Mr. Shaw, thank you for joining me on Engaging Experts.

Marty Shaw: Thank you for inviting me. It’s a pleasure.

Noah Bolmer: You’ve been in the trees for most of your career. How did you first become involved as an expert witness?

Marty Shaw: We’d have to go back to when I was a wholesale distributor for tree healthcare products, and I was calling on a guy out in Memphis. His name was Fred Morgan. He was different from every other customer that I had. He didn’t seem to do a lot. I called him up and asked him if I could spend some time with him and he said, “Yeah, sure, come on by.” We spent about half a day together and we drove around, looked at some trees, talked about the trees, and what he was going to tell the customer about them. It didn’t click for me to understand what it was that he did for a living. I didn’t get it. So, I asked him if I could spend another half a day with him. Finally, after spending that much time with him, he was able to explain it to me in a way that I could finally understand. He went around and talked to people, and they paid him to give them tree advice. Some of the times when he’d give advice, he would be talking to attorneys and people that were engaged in a conflict and needed to have an expert testify. At the end of that second session with him, I said, “Fred, do you think I’d be any good at that?” Because I heard that and was like, “Man, that’s for me.” He looked at me and said, “Marty, you’d be great at it.” He was right. That was my first introduction to our arboricultural consulting in general, but the first experience that I had dealing with the potential for litigation and doing consulting in that arena.

It wasn’t long after that I became a member of the American Society of Consulting Arborists and attended something called the ASCA Academy. It’s a week-long academy that the ASCA folks do, and they teach you about things like how to testify, how to write a report, and various aspects of consulting work. It seemed to focus narrowly on litigation work and that was the part that I was interested in. Maybe that was my perception, but for me, it was all about, “Man, I want to get into this arena where you get to testify.”

Noah Bolmer: Did you know about expert witnessing prior to that, even as a topic at all?

Marty Shaw: I had been called upon a few times as a certified arborist to testify in General Sessions court, small potato stuff, and I was completely ill equipped to do anything like that. When I went to the academy, it gave me a sense of, “I can do this.” Of course, at the time I had no idea if I could even make a living at it or feed my family or whatever, but I did want to do it and I had a desire to be good at it. I started buying and reading a lot of different books, and then I would call the authors of those books whenever I had a question about what they wrote. They always appreciated my calls. I learned a lot and did a lot of research. Then I started getting calls from attorneys, insurance adjusters, and people that needed an expert in their case. I told them what my experience was as an arborist and soon I started getting cases regularly. It takes a bit of time to develop practice as an arborist and at the time, I just wanted to do it. I had no idea that it would be so rewarding. That was my introduction to arboricultural consulting.

Noah Bolmer: You receive a phone call from an attorney, or sometimes the representative of an attorney, what’s that initial phone call like? What are the questions that they ask to vet you to see that you have the experience, and are the correct person for the facts of this case? How do you vet them and decide, this is somebody who I want to work with and is an engagement worth accepting?

Marty Shaw: I’ve been around long enough to where people have heard about me from somebody else. They already know that I’m the guy that they want to talk to. I’ve a good website that’s descriptive and details the different types of assignments that I do. When these guys call, they already know what they’re getting into, and they need some affirmation that I know how to help them with their case. I’ll ask them a lot of questions that are technical in nature. I’ll give them some experience of how these cases typically go, what to look for, and where the pitfalls are, because they want to know all that stuff. Then after about 5 minutes, they realize, this is the guy. I don’t need to look anymore. [Many] times, they’ve been looking for a while. It surprises me that people have looked for over a year for an expert and not found one. When they finally get ahold of me, they’re like, “Man, where have you been?”

Noah Bolmer: Is it a fairly narrow field? In other words, are there a lot of experts doing what you do, or would you say that you’re one of the few out there?

Marty Shaw: If I was going to make a suggestion to anybody thinking about becoming an expert witness for cases involving litigation, then I would suggest that they carve out their own niche because everything that I do is nuanced and niche oriented. There are perhaps maybe a dozen people in the whole country that do what I do for a living, and I’m the top one when it comes to certain subject matter.

Noah Bolmer: Do you know [many] of the other people in your field on a personal basis? Do you find yourself on the other side of the table working in opposition to them? In other words, they’re engaged by the other side. You’re a plaintiff and they’re a defendant.

Marty Shaw: I can do better than that. I’ll get a phone call from an attorney and it’s a juicy case. They talk to me, and they are hedging and hawing on it and not sure what they want to do. “We’ll call you back.” Then the next day, I’ll get another call from the attorney on the other side of that case. He’ll say, “We’d like you to look at this case. What do you charge?” I’ll say, “I got a call from the other party in this case and whoever sends the retainer check first, they’re going to get to hire me.”

Noah Bolmer: I’ve heard sometimes from expert witnesses that in a field that doesn’t have a lot of experts, sometimes one side will retain a specific expert just so the other side doesn’t have the opportunity to retain them. Is that something that’s ever happened to you?

Marty Shaw: I’m sure it has. I wouldn’t know directly, but there have been cases where I’ve been sent a retainer check and I never hear from them again.

Noah Bolmer: Speaking of retainer checks, let’s talk a little about your billing. Do you do a non-refundable retainer? It seems like you do. Do you do hourly rates, or project rates? Tell me about your billing.

Marty Shaw: I’m always going to offer a non-refundable retainer to people that want to retain me, and it’s a minimum amount that I hold until the conclusion of the assignment. I do charge an hourly rate for most things, but when it comes to court testimony or depositions, I have a flat rate for an eight-hour day. If it goes over eight hours, I charge for another day.

Noah Bolmer: Sure. Do you have a travel rate or is travel involved in your work as an expert witness?

Marty Shaw: As a standard of my practice, I always charge for time of travel, and I charge any expenses plus 20%.

Noah Bolmer: Let’s talk a little about preparation. You’re getting ready for a big case. Maybe you have a deposition coming up. Maybe it’s the actual trial. How do you get ready? What are the things that make you feel prepared and ready to go into action?

Marty Shaw: In conversations with whoever’s going to hire me, I always explain to them that there’s a couple of different processes that we need to do so that we can be thoroughly prepared, and that’s for his or her benefit, as well as my benefit. I always write a detailed report before any testimony. The detailed report is going to contain everything that I would need to testify to. It’s going to have all my opinions, conclusions, and all the supporting documentation that you would need to meet a Daubert challenge or some other challenge.

Noah Bolmer: Have you ever been the subject of a Daubert challenge?

Marty Shaw: Many times.

Noah Bolmer: What’s that like? Walk me through it.

Marty Shaw: They’ll look at your CV and your shortcomings and they’ll say, “You didn’t do this, and you didn’t do that. You don’t have this credential or that credential, and how can you testify about this or that?” It’s a matter of answering those questions in a calm, and assertive way that shows that, yes, you are an authority on the subject matter and that the court should allow you to testify. It’s always a throw of the dice, though, because you don’t always know how well the attorney that’s on your side is going to handle the Daubert challenge because it doesn’t come up every day, but it does come up. There are rules and regulations that the court has to abide by in order to meet the Daubert standard, and so you’re explaining to the court how you meet all of those requirements. Hopefully, the attorney that you’re working with is familiar with them and knows how to handle it.

Noah Bolmer: Have you had to deal with an attorney trying to impeach you on something that you said 15 years ago, or is maybe taken out of context? How do you deal with keeping track of everything that you’ve ever said as it relates to your career and being able to defend those positions, or say, “I changed my mind.” Or “New information became available.”

Marty Shaw: That’s exactly right. You don’t have to go back forever because there’s a limit in most jurisdictions of four years. If you’ve testified one way in a previous case, and then in this case, you have to testify in a different way or give a slightly different version of it, then you have to justify the different information and the different fact patterns that are associated with that testimony. As long as you base it on the differences in the facts and not just you suddenly changed your mind. Perhaps you found new information by reading a book or what have you, then you’re allowed to change your testimony from one case to another. You can’t do it flippantly, though.

Noah Bolmer: I’ve had experts tell me that sometimes, not necessarily Daubert challenges, but a deposition can go on for an extended period of time, eight hours or more some days. Have you been subject to an endless deposition? How do you deal with not only keeping your cool, keeping it together, and being able to answer all the questions, but being able to deal with the endurance that it takes to make it through one of these sessions?

Marty Shaw: Normally, there’s going to be a limit to how much time that one side or the other can ask questions. I was once in a deposition involving a personal injury. This happened to be in Alabama and there were eight attorneys. Each one representing a different party, and they were going around and around. This thing did last eight hours, and after eight hours, my attorney just piped up and said, “We’re getting to the point now where we’re starting to wear out the endurance of anybody that’s going to be expected to testify. There have been, I think, 1,500 questions in this deposition so far, and we’re going to end it right now. If we need to come back, we’ll revisit it.”

Noah Bolmer: Getting ready for one of these things, besides obviously being prepared, reading your reports as you stated, things like that, are there any intangibles? I’ve had expert witnesses tell me they like to do breathing exercises, yoga, have a big breakfast, or completely fast. Do you have any pre-trial or pre-deposition routines that get you ready to go? Gets you in the right head space.

Marty Shaw: I do an affirmation, at least I used to. I haven’t done it in years, but when I first started out, I was nervous, timid, and uptight about it. So, I would take a few minutes in a quiet corner by myself and say, “I like myself. I like myself. I like myself. I’m confident. I’m competent. I have the correct answers. I have a great memory.” I would do these affirmations for about five or 10 minutes, and it helped.

Noah Bolmer: Let’s move to the general a little. What do you find meaningful about being an expert witness? [To] put another way, why are expert witnesses important?

Marty Shaw: We work in an industry where the nature of the beast is conflict. If we do a good job, are thorough in our investigations, and clear in our explanations of things, then we have an opportunity to help level the playing field, clear the air, and help people reach a conflict resolution. Ultimately, that’s my motivation. I’m also one of those people that digs justice. I like to see when people get what they deserve.

Noah Bolmer: You’ve been doing this for a while now. Over 15 years, at least. What have you seen change in terms of being an expert witness? I’ve had experts tell me that Zoom, and telepresence have changed the way that they go about being an expert. Are there any changes that you’ve seen, and are there any trends moving forward?

Marty Shaw: There have been a lot of changes. When COVID hit, there was an awful lot of work that wasn’t being done. [Many] courts closed down. Anything that did occur seemed to happen over remotely via Zoom or some other teleprompter type situation.

Noah Bolmer: Sure.

Marty Shaw: Those innovations are going to be the wave of the future. As courts allow, there are going to be more remote testimony than there is today. The courts have to get used to the technology and to the idea that it’s okay to have somebody testify from their own office or workspace, and that’s a big change. There have been other changes. With the advent of drones and remote sensing, I can get a much better, more relevant picture of a site than without the drone. It tells me exactly what the site conditions are at that moment and that’s an informative piece of information because we can do a lot with the imagery. We can create elevation maps. We can do NDVI plant health maps. We can see the site as it is, and we can take measurements from an accurate orthomosaic map. The use of drones has dramatically impacted my practice. I was the first consulting arborist to use drones in my practice regularly and now I use it on almost every assignment.

Noah Bolmer: Do these drone images lead to demonstratives that you might use either in your expert witness report or in front of a jury?

Marty Shaw: A picture says a thousand words. [For] this drone imagery that I can create, I use a DJI drone, and then I take the images that I gather and upload to something called DroneDeploy. It creates all these different types of imagery that tell me different things about the site that could be relevant. I almost always find something relevant to my work and the case at hand when I have the drone imagery. Without it, there’s so much that I couldn’t do. It’s like one of those technologies that you’ll find a use for it if you have it and I’ll tell you; I have found immeasurable uses. It’s the most profitable service that I offer and it’s the most useful tool that I own by far.

Noah Bolmer: Do you ever get any pushback from engaging attorneys regarding site visits, sending up drones, and all this kind of stuff? People who are Luddites who don’t understand the importance of this sort of drone testimony.

Marty Shaw: It’s intimidating to them because I’ve never been challenged on it.

Noah Bolmer: Have you worked in different venues? I know that you’re located in Tennessee. Have you worked in other states? Perhaps at local and federal? Perhaps in criminal and tort? Have you worked in a variety of different venues in your career as an expert witness?

Marty Shaw: In the United States, I’ve worked at every level of litigation. Then, I’ve worked in twenty-six states. I’ve had a lot of exposure to different jurisdictions and venues, whether it’s state or federal. The biggest difference is whether you’re a Fry state or a Daubert state

Noah Bolmer: You mentioned earlier in our discussion that as a technical person, communicating these complex topics, you sometimes have a lot of technical questions when you’re vetting an attorney. How do you get some of this technical information across to juries in a way that they can easily digest it?

Marty Shaw: That’s a real skill because it’s easy to get the deer in the headlights, glossed over eyes, and they’re starting to go to sleep. You can tell when you’re testifying if you’re losing them. I have a real knack for being able to take complex issues, boil them down to their simplest elements, then bullet point them quickly and easily, so we seamlessly flow from one subject matter to another. Then, trying to tie everything together with simple, easy to understand analogies.

Noah Bolmer: Is there something that expert witnesses can do to improve their improve that skill?

Marty Shaw: Practice. You [have] to practice on people that don’t know anything about what you do.

Noah Bolmer: Just try and communicate your niche to them and see if they can repeat it back to you.

Marty Shaw: People generally want to give you feedback and they’re eager to help you and depending on the audience. If it’s your wife, your kids or whatever, they’ll tell you if they don’t understand something or if it doesn’t make sense. [Many] times, people will ask, “What is it that you do for a living?” To try to make it easier for them, I say, “Have you ever seen that show CSI?” Invariably people say, “Sure, I’ve seen CSI.” I say, “That’s what I do for anything related to trees.”

Noah Bolmer: [Many] people don’t realize that expert witnesses don’t exist in a vacuum. There are trial teams. Sometimes there are paralegals. Sometimes there are assistants. Sometimes there are a bunch of expert witnesses. Maybe you’re in your field, but probably in a lot of other fields, especially for large litigation. On larger trial teams, have you worked with other expert witnesses in your career?

Marty Shaw: Sure, I’ve had a lot of experience. I have a lot of connections that are cross-cultural. For example, I’m not a surveyor, so I would never take on a surveying assignment. I could take on the assignment and then reassign that task to a surveyor. I would definitely be what would be considered a lead expert on a case. I’m the guy that the attorneys go, “We need this, this, this, and this. Who have you got?” Then, I could say, “This is outside of my area, but I can get this guy over here who deals with meteorology. I have another guy over here who deals with wood science, and another guy over here that deals with this.” Staying in your lane is vitally important when it comes to expert witnessing and if you don’t know, you can always farm it out to somebody who does.

Noah Bolmer: When you subcontract it out to another trusted party, is that between you and them or do they then become part of the overall expert witness agreement with the attorney?

Marty Shaw: It depends on how the attorney wants to handle it. Some attorneys want to handle all that stuff in-house and want their experts to work directly for them. Other attorneys are happy to let you handle the contractor and let them work directly for you. It depends on the situation and how the attorneys want to handle it.

Noah Bolmer: Let’s talk about red flags for a moment. Are there any things that either during the initial phone call, or at some point during the engagement, that sets you off and tells you that something’s not quite right, is going to go wrong, or needs to change. What are the red flags that you’ve experienced?

Marty Shaw: Usually, the attorney is clear on what they need. If they’re good, they typically want you to do your investigation and then they want to know what you find. The red flags that you typically run into are, “We need somebody to testify next week, and we need them to testify this, this, this, this, and this.” Then, I go, “That’s not the way this is supposed to work. Maybe it would better to check back in a month or so after you had a chance to get some more time.” If somebody’s in a real hurry, that’s usually the biggest red flag that you just blew it.

Noah Bolmer: Yeah, you—

Marty Shaw: I won’t be able to dig you out of it.

Noah Bolmer: Timing is something that comes up a lot. I hear from experts that [many] times they have these last-minute rush jobs. In your experience, do the attorneys typically engage you in appropriate time where you have sufficient time to get them whatever they need. [To do] an expert witness report, do whatever research you need, [and] go over the case materials they send you. Do you feel a crunch regularly?

Marty Shaw: If the time constraint gets iffy, I bow out. I don’t try to meet their timelines because I’m busy as it is. And I’ve got other cases. I’m not just sitting here working on their case and that’s it. I do have other cases that may, or may not, take priority. I did have a situation the other day that was fairly urgent because it was a personal injury case. A tree fell on a family and somebody got hurt badly. The attorney told me while I was talking to them, “The party that owns this tree is destroying the evidence. They’ve got chippers, and trucks, and they’re hauling stuff off. We need to get down there right away.” In that case, I made an exception. I’m like, “It makes sense.” We did the engagement quickly. We got down there, got the information, and now we have everything we need. We can slow down because we’re at the beginning of the case rather than at the end of the case.

Noah Bolmer: Are there any seminal cases that come to mind, things that either changed the way that you fundamentally go about being an expert witness or reinforced something that you were already doing?

Marty Shaw: There was one case I had in Washington, D.C., and during the case and trial, I was testifying, and I made an emphatic statement about there was a fungus inside this tree to the judge. The judge didn’t like that very much and he said, “That’s just hearsay.” I believe that question went to the Court of Appeals, and they changed the rule now. If you have not cited the reference that you’re going to testify about in your report, then they’re not going to allow you to testify about it at trial. You have to cite it in the report. That was the difference because before you used to be able to say, “I talked to so-and-so who was the leading expert on this, and they said it was this.” Now, they’re not going to allow you to.

Noah Bolmer: Do you have any expert witnessing stories that will either motivate newer expert witnesses or tell me something about your career as an expert witness? Tell me a story.

Marty Shaw: I don’t know if this is a motivational story or if it’s an interesting, fascinating, “Wow, I never would have imagined kind of thing.” How about I wow you for a minute?

Noah Bolmer: Wow me.

Marty Shaw: It’s a case that I had down in a large major metropolitan city in the southeast. You can probably guess which city it was. My client was an attorney who was representing a tree company that had gone out and done some work for a set of twins in a nice, high end, no mortgage neighborhood. My clients got the contract. He goes out and does tree work for this set of twins. He gets the work done, and a period of time goes by and they don’t get paid. They keep calling this—let’s just call one of the twins, Ingrid. Ingrid signs the check and says, “Thank you very much. Never call us again.” Ingrid, in her past career, was an insurance adjuster and she knew the game. She sues them. That’s when I become involved. They called me up. It was a lot of money. We’re talking the [young couple] was going to get buried in legal fees. I go down there, and we do the site visit. My attorney’s there. Her attorney’s there. The tree company’s representative is there, and I have a helper with me to look at the place and I’m telling them, “Show me everything that was damaged.” I bring all of this information back. I do twenty core samples of the tree. We do all kinds of analysis and basically, it’s buck, right? I write my report, and I never hear from anybody ever again.

I got another case in the same city, and I’m thinking, “Who do I know down there that I could talk to that could give me some information that I need?” I thought, I’ll call the tree company up. I worked for him. He’s probably happy with what I did. I never heard from him again, so maybe that case is over and done with. I called him on the phone, and he says, “Marty, Marty, did you hear what happened?” I said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He said, “You’ve got to hear the rest of the story.” We take care of our business, and he says, “You know that guy, the attorney that was working for Ingrid? I said, “Yeah.” [He said], “He was a womanizer, a gambler, a drug addict, and a murderer.” I was like, “What? I’ve never heard anything like this.” He said, “Your case broke the whole thing wide open. After your case, Ingrid found out he was stealing money from his clients. Thousands and thousands of dollars. He had already settled the case, and he never told her. He was going to go before the judge and go to jail for five years. He lost his law license and everything.” I said, “Oh, my gosh. Man.” He said, “That’s not the rest of the story. [On] the day he was going to be sentenced, he took off his ankle bracelet, went over to his mother’s house, and ended up stabbing her with a kitchen knife, stealing her car, and driving to Nashville.” The U.S. Marshals finally caught up with this guy, and he’s gone to jail for the rest of his life. He’ll never get out.

Noah Bolmer: Wow.

Marty Shaw: Wow story.

Noah Bolmer: That brings up a common topic that I get, which is expert witnesses don’t know what happens to the disposition of their case after they leave because they’re not there. They’re there for their part and then they peace out. That’s an absolutely unbelievable story.

Marty Shaw: Thanks for letting me share it.

Noah Bolmer: Let’s talk about relationships for a moment. What makes for a positive expert witness/attorney relationship? How do you get off on the right foot? How do you maintain that positive inertia throughout the engagement?

Marty Shaw: There are three things that you can count on when it comes to having a good working relationship with the attorney. Number one, both sides have to set down clear expectations. Number two, you [have] to communicate. Number three, you’ve got to show gratitude. If you have those three elements, everything else is easy.

Noah Bolmer: Tell me a little about gratitude. How can an expert witness display gratitude towards an attorney who’s taking care of their needs and vice versa?

Marty Shaw: By producing the report and getting the information they need on time. Usually, these cases have an order that requires certain things. Discovery is be done in a certain time. Then all the other things are going to be in place, and then you have the trial. As long as you get all your stuff done by the end of discovery or when the attorney needs them in a timely fashion, then that’s showing gratitude for the work. Also being courteous to help them with their case. On the other hand, the attorney only has one job, and that’s to pay your bills, and to me, the greatest sign of gratitude is when you get paid.

Noah Bolmer: Absolutely. Before we wrap up, do you have any last advice for experts or attorneys working with experts?

Marty Shaw: If you’re first starting out, don’t rely on being a testifying expert as your only source of income. You’ve got to be doing other stuff and ease your way into that practice. Eventually, if you’re good at it, then the money will come and you’ll be able to do it full time, but it does take a while. Be patient, do the work, do the time, and eventually people will find out about you, and they’ll come to you.

Noah Bolmer: Absolutely. Mr. Shaw, thank you for joining me today.

Marty Shaw: Thank you so much. I appreciate it and I like your broadcast.

Noah Bolmer: Great. Thank you so much. And thank you as always to our listeners for joining us for another edition of Engaging Experts. Cheers.

Marty Shaw, Founder of Green Season Consulting

Marty Shaw, is the founder and owner of Green Season Consulting, a full-service arboricultural consultancy with services ranging from forensic investigations to tree value offering services ranging from forensic investigations to tree valuation appraisals. He's an ISA certified arborist, a published author, and an experienced expert witness.