In this episode…  

Comfortable is credible, according to Dr. Leslie Dobson. She advises strong familiarity with your audio and video setup, so you aren’t fumbling about during remote sessions. Additionally, she recommends that experts practice not only what they say, but the pronunciation and manner of delivery 

Check out the entire episode for our discussion on social media versus publication, acting as a rebuttal witness, and knowing your worth.  

 

Note: Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Host: Noah Bolmer, Round Table Group 

Guest: Dr. Leslie Dobson, Clinical and Forensic Psychologist 

Noah Bolmer: Welcome to Engaging Experts. I’m your host Noah Bolmer, and today I’m excited to welcome Dr. Leslie Dobson to the show. Dr. Dobson is a clinical and forensic psychologist with a private practice. She is an expert in forensic psychology focusing on civil law and forensic evaluations for sexual abuse allegations. Dr. Dobson holds a Doctor of Psychology from Loma Linda University. Dr. Dobson, thank you so much for joining me here today on Engaging Experts. 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: Thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to it. 

Noah Bolmer: Of course, let’s jump into it. So, you’ve been a clinical psychologist for over a decade, and over 12 years now. How did you first get involved as an expert witness? 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: Oh, I originally wanted to work with very dangerous people. I wanted to work with the most mentally ill people in the world. That’s where I take everything to the extreme because I came from a clinical program. I would go inside jails and prisons, and I would work with them and try to understand their minds. And I became very interested in violence, risk assessment and sexually violent risk assessment. I wanted to know: How do we know if they’re dangerous? How do we know if they’re going to recidivate or do this again? What is the science behind this when we’ve always seen psychology as a soft science rather than a harder science like psychiatry and other medicines?  

And so, as I learned more about the statistics and the research that goes into making a true forensic psychologist, I wanted to teach juries that. Lawyers found it very helpful that I could explain it to a jury because I had only recently learned it myself. Right? I was pretty young in my career. As I started my family, I moved from the criminal side into the civil side. One, because of my own safety. The last day I was working in a state hospital, there was a hit on me, and I was told to just get out. And two, because civil litigation allows me to be so much more creative and I absolutely love the creativity of, you know— I want to look at a person preinjury. I want to see what they were like, their family, their friends, academics, everything. I want to see the alleged injury. Was it an assault of some type? Was it a car accident? I want to see then how everything about them changed afterwards. Now, did we exacerbate things that were already present in their psychology, or did this incident do it? And do we have science to back up that? And I put them together— I didn’t make them; I learned how to use them. But this intense psychological assessment of numerous tests and batteries and screeners, semi-structured conversations and interviews where I can show that somebody is valid and truthful. Or I can show that they are faking good or faking bad and they’re not reliable. I get hired by lawyers as an expert and they don’t know where I’m going to go. Right? They don’t. I’m not biased. I’m going to let the numbers play out, and sometimes they’re not happy. 

Noah Bolmer: Well, tell me some about some of those first phone calls that you ever got. Was it out of the blue? Were you seeking expert witness engagements? How did that first come about? 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: One of the first that I got was through a friend of a friend. And it was when we started doing certificates of merit. So, individuals over 40-years-old could sue in civil litigation for sexual assault, but they had to have this certificate of merit from a mental health professional stating that they were valid and reliable in their story, and that their memory was still intact. And a variety of other things that I would talk to them about. As I started hearing more and more of their stories and my certificates were put into court, they could sue. I gained more of a reputation for being an expert on cases that were then moving forward. I can remember some of my first phone calls being so excited to get to know the person, and then wow, after hundreds, all I heard were the patterns. All I heard were the patterns of the Catholic priests, the patterns of the Jehovah’s Witness brothers and the Elders. And then I started studying the, you know, the Bible. I wanted to understand Deuteronomy 19:15. And you need two witnesses. You know, I started to want to understand the full mindset of the individual: how they were harmed, but how they were held captive by the authority and the entity that they were in. And it might have been a school, right? [Could] be a boss.  You know, it could be a music mogul. But I wanted to be able to articulate their world and see the damage it caused them. I became very excited, and I over-educated myself. 

Noah Bolmer: Did you have anyone kind of showing you the ropes or mentoring you at all in terms of what to expect in an expert witness engagement or did you just hit the ground running and jump in the pool?  

Dr. Leslie Dobson: My father is a lawyer. I should add that. I’m surrounded by lawyers all the time because of his friendships. But then I also knew many lawyers working on the criminal side. I reached out to a lot—I took a lot of CEs [continuing education]. If there is a lesson on and updates to the PAI, the Personality Assessment Inventory, I’m going to pay $600 to take that. And it’s worth it, right? Because of the work that comes from your knowledge. And then as things moved forward, I didn’t have to relearn the content because I’m doing it so frequently now that I’m better on the stand and better in depositions. My reports are more linear, and they hit home harder. I’m better at engaging the client in deep things in a faster way. 

Noah Bolmer: So, Dr. Dobson, we have an elephant in the room that needs to be addressed, and that is that you are Internet famous. We don’t have to get into the entirety of the TikTok drama, but I am interested in how being Internet famous interplays with your career as an expert witness. Is this something that comes up in initial phone calls? In depositions? At trial? How does this —how does this incident affect your career: negative, positive or other? 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: I don’t know if— I’m not a good gauge for the negative part of it, because if they’re not calling, I wouldn’t know, right? But what I can say is that I’m getting a lot of jobs. I have attorneys calling me several times a day, retaining me as an expert and a lot of it is because I’m very transparent. You can go on my social media, and you can see how I talk to the world. You know from 3rd grade up we should all be able to understand the concept and I can give that to you. Right? You also see on my social media that I don’t back down. In that I can hold myself in cross examination and that I’m not fearful. Things lawyers like in an expert [are things] they can see. So, it’s almost like social media became a very big interview and curriculum vitae for me. 

Noah Bolmer: When your life is out there, when you are heavily using social media, do you ever worry about, “Oh boy, if I say one off word somebody’s going to bring that up in a in a deposition or in court.” Or do you just not worry about it? What is your social media strategy? 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: I try to stay away from politics and religion on social media. One, because I would lose half of my followers. Two, because it is biased. But I come from—I joke a lot. I use a lot of dark satire, but I also come from truth and authenticity and transparency. And I am going to teach people what they are maybe too ignorant or too scared to hear. And if I need to bring statistics into that and research, I will. And then if an attorney tries to use it against me or tries to discredit me, you know, I hold faith in the other attorney to show the counterpart.  I definitely know how to engage an audience. I have half a million followers in just one year. But that also comes with—that’s a lot of fun for lawyers to use in their favor in a case. 

Noah Bolmer: So, you’ve been doing this for a while. You have a lot of cases behind you. Let’s talk a little bit about your preparation methods. This is something I like to ask all of my guests. Some people have some very specific rituals, “I like to do yoga and drink six cappuccinos and stand on my head before a trial”. And some people like to listen to loud music. And some people fast. Some people don’t do anything at all. What is your pretrial ritual if you have one at all?  

Dr. Leslie Dobson: I shouldn’t give it away because I don’t bill for it, but I— About a week before a trial, I will take the amount of information in a book, and I will bring it down to a Post-it note. And I may need to write it by hand. I will have to memorize it. I will say it in front of the mirror. I will memorize my report. But also, the foundation of my report, which extends to this human’s life, the party being sued and all of the statistics and science behind all the measurements being used. So that I want to walk up there without needing to remember anything, but it just feels like it’s a part of what I know. And the funny thing is I’m always overprepared. I always tell lawyers, “Don’t get in the weeds with the psychologist.” It’s really true. It’s so in-depth, our knowledge, and if you can use the psychologist to have that depth shown, knowing the other side probably has not prepared enough to go into the weeds like that, you’ve won your case. 

Noah Bolmer: You talk about memorizing, at least in broad strokes, your expert witness report and the important facts to the case. You can usually in most venues—this is not true everywhere—refer to your report during a trial. You can take a moment and look at your report to refresh your memory. Do you find that it’s better to have it memorized and not have to refer to your report? 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: Yes. Because I think the jury finds [greater credibility], and the judge—because a judge will look at me as a young woman and discredit me immediately. So, I think my credibility comes with the tightness of my answer and the tightness and speed of my response, but also the manipulation of looking at the report is a tactic they use. And so, if I can remove as many manipulative tactics [as possible] and I can engage in the manipulation by pausing and clearing my thoughts and stating my answer, then I maintain my confidence and the flow is better. The credibility remains. 

Noah Bolmer: Do you feel that your time on camera—because obviously anyone who’s heavily into social spends a lot of time on camera, do you find that that helps you in connecting with judges during bench trials or juries or attorneys during depositions? In general, does it prepare you at all? And if so, the follow up question is, do you feel that is something that everybody should be practicing in this day of Zoom depositions and trials and whatnot?  

Dr. Leslie Dobson: I think people need to be comfortable with their equipment if they are doing Zoom. They need to flawlessly prepare in that way. That your monitor is set up and your speaker and your mic are set up. A lot of the time, in my cases we’re talking about sexual things and lawyers don’t pronounce words correctly, especially words of body parts. And they shy away from the interaction of, let’s say, a grown male pedophile and a child. And if I can on point say, “You pronounced that incorrectly. It’s not labia, it’s labia.” They [then] lose track. And I take control back. I think a lot of being on social media and receiving criticism from people and them saying, “You know, your voice is too soft, the vocal fry is too high right now, you’re not looking at the camera. You’re pixelated. You could have really honed in on that area, but you didn’t. You shied away from it. Why?” Getting all—and now that I’ve started the podcast, I’m getting this even more in depth, but it’s helping me actually concretize a good show. And that is what testimony is. 

Noah Bolmer: Absolutely. Do you have a story or two about cases that you’ve been on that have either reinforced something that you already do or changed the way that you go about some aspect of expert witnessing? 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: I was hired as a rebuttal psychologist. And those cases are a lot of fun. I got to rip apart another psychologist report and I found a lot of errors in the reports, but what I found more interesting was looking at the video depositions  of everyone in play in the case and pairing that with the errors in the report and bringing in my expertise of substance use into the case. 

So, you can read a report, and you can also read a transcript. But if you see somebody in timed increments going to the bathroom with the sniffles, their pupils dilated, their body movements restless, their fatigue coming at a certain point . . . that was very important for me in that case to say “Actually, we didn’t quite show that the individual was lying, but now it makes sense why the scales and the tests were this way. They’re erratic because of the substance use.” And then I think within a day they settled.  

Noah Bolmer: Do you find that a lot of cases are moving to settlement these days? 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: They’re not even moving to deposition. I mean, I’m being hired as a pre— I don’t know a scary pre-letter person. I’m being hired to do a full psychological evaluation on individuals and that is being presented as almost like a cash grab. And I’m OK with it because I just get my money by the hour and I will only speak to who I believe. You know, lawyers will do what lawyers do, right? But if I believe in the case and I truly believe the victims were injured, why put them through all of this deposition and testimony? Why reinjure them and retraumatize them if I can do this ahead of time for them? 

Noah Bolmer: Do you have any specific terms in your contract for, for instance, do you take for travel? Do you have a different rate? Do you have a rate for depositions? Do you like to do project rates, or do you use hourly rates? 

00:19:16 Dr. Leslie Dobson: It is a bit flexible with reading information and reviewing because in psychology there is often a lot more to review. So, I will sometimes go by page number reviews. One to one hundred is a certain fee. I don’t actually know the fee that we’ve got set or if that is just too extreme, like I need to refresh my mind on the whole Bible then I would just set a flat rate. There are some cases where I need to hire my own security that has to come with me, and so we bring all of that into it. But you know, I normally I pay for my own food, but not my flights. 

Noah Bolmer: Have you worked in different venues, for example, civil versus criminal?  Have you worked in different states? Have you worked for federal cases? What’s it like to work from one venue to the next?  Do you have to make sure you are somewhat familiar with the laws and procedures of those areas? And if so, how do you familiarize yourself? Do you talk to your attorney?  What’s your procedure for making sure that you’re ready to go in a new and unfamiliar venue? 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: Ask the attorneys to save a couple of hours before deposition or trial to educate me, but because they are hiring me as the expert, I put it on myself to do my research. So, I’ll seek out a local psychologist. I work out of state all the time, and then the differences between superior, federal—all these courts [seem] to me is like a trajectory of respect. The bigger the federal court, I feel like I owe the judge more respect, and he will give it to me. The lower the court, the less professionalism I expect to see and meet, but I still carry myself the same way. 

Noah Bolmer: You mentioned before that you have been a rebuttal witness. Let’s talk about that a little bit. What is the difference between working for the plaintiff and working for the defendant?  What’s it like being a rebuttal witness and starting with somebody else’s expert witness report and responding to it? 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: My case is I haven’t evaluated the individual that I’m rebutting against. So, I’ve been given all of the information and the report, all of the raw data from the evaluation. And I’ll run everything through my own system again. I’ll look for inconsistencies. I will do a full item analysis. We’ve got the MMPI, [with] 500 questions. We’ve got the PAI, [with] 300 questions, and I’m going to go and look at every single one and see if that psychologist typed that in correctly. And I’m going to see if there is any bias at all. And then I’m going to go back and compare that to the history [and] the video. Did the psychologist take breaks? Was he condescending? Was the individual harmed by an adult male that looked like the psychologist? Could there be trauma present in the room? Basically, an opportunity to educate attorneys on all these differences.  

I think one of the key things that I don’t think the industry knows right now—and this was put out by the Neuropsychological Association, is that psychologists cannot give their raw data to anybody else but a psychologist. And that is our ethics. So, if you hire a psychiatrist and you don’t get to see my numbers- 

Noah Bolmer: Just your conclusions. 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: Yes. And so, the power is in the raw data. So, you need to— we’re shifting the culture; you need to hire a psychologist and not a psychiatrist if you really want [a] psychological assessment. 

Noah Bolmer: How do you stay current in your field? This is obviously a fairly dynamic field. There’s a lot that’s happening both legally, but also in terms of medicine. How do you stay on top of everything to not only to be an expert, but to remain an expert? 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: I definitely try and stay in my lane, and I pay way too much for journals. I am a member of The American Psychological Association [in] California, Los Angeles [and] Orange County. I am in the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals, which is very diverse— [including members] all the way to ex-CIA. And everyone’s always sharing relevant information and new research. And here’s the key to social media: if I read this stuff, then I can make a video on it, and I have content. And the way that you build a presence on social media is by offering consistent content. So, I educate myself, I grow on the social side, I increase my brand deals, I end up getting more jobs as an expert. 

Noah Bolmer: Not to put too fine a point on it, but is [social media] content the new “being published” by journals these days? In other words, is this the primary way in which young medical professionals can get some of their opinions out there, but in a digestible way that’s useful to a broader audience compared to publishing in a scientific journal?  

Dr. Leslie Dobson: One hundred percent. And those are my most viral videos, and I’m talking about a million views. When I bring forward current research, it’s incredible. I like to compare myself to a car accident. You know, you’re driving on the freeway, and you don’t really want to look, but you look and then you engage and then you know, you’re staring and you’re slowing down and you’re really watching the gore. And that’s my presentation on social media. If someone sees an attractive woman, a soft voice, they’re like, “Oh, what does she have to say? OK, she’s talking about a pedophile.  

Noah Bolmer: There’s definitely a juxtaposition there. How do you go about taking these potentially complex, difficult topics and breaking them down in a way that people can digest and understand but still convey the important bits to them? Because I imagine it’s the same thing. Going into a jury trial, you are—you have a jury of laypersons. They’re not necessarily going to be experts in your field. So, you have to make it digestible, but it also has to convey all the important information there. How do you go about doing that? 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: I use a lot of neuropsychology. I’m clumping things. I am using the recency effect. I’ll start with a big umbrella of information and then I’ll keep going. I’ll get narrower and narrower, and I’ll let the attorney decide if it’s too much and [let me know] if they want me to stop. I need the attorneys to listen when I’m—so, what I do is—we need that broad scope of understanding. We need the title, we need to outline the plot, and we need the conclusion. And then if you want me to go in [more], I’ll go in more. 

Noah Bolmer: Let’s move to the general a little bit. What makes for a positive attorney expert relationship? 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: Transparency. I think attorneys will hold information back from me a lot of times and I’ll find out about the information on the stand, or I’ll find out because it’s in the other expert’s reports. And if you don’t want to pay me to read it, that’s one thing. But if you don’t want me to read it because it’s going to skew my opinion, it’s going to come out. And so, the consistency of information amongst everyone involved and the transparency of their theory and their method for me is very helpful so that I’m not caught off guard. And so that I don’t over speak or get too cagey. 

Noah Bolmer: When you are in a larger trial, often there is a group of experts, not just one. There’s a trial team that can be assistants and paralegals and a team of   attorneys, and a bunch of people. How do you interact with all of these people? Are you pretty cordoned off in your own world, or is there some relationship between you and the other members? Obviously besides the lead attorney, are you working with the other members of the trial team or are you pretty much in your own little world? 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: It really depends. I’m in my own world when it comes to coming up with my opinion and basing it on every piece of information, I can get my hands on, which may be the other experts’ reports. But there is no going back and forth of, “Oh this is what I think, [and] this is what I think.” Right? Like a jury might be doing. When it comes time to testify and to be around everyone, I tend not to talk to anyone. I mean, I will use bathrooms on different floors. I will just try to stay away from everyone because I would—I don’t want anyone thinking I’m colluding and using it against me. 

Noah Bolmer: Sure. Do you have any bad experiences that have become learning experiences in your career? 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: I think reminding myself to stay in my lane and that everybody has a role and a job, and to not let the attorneys get under my skin. That’s probably been the biggest lesson throughout all of this because, you know, attorneys are masterful at it.  

And when I went to [a] trial, I was really young in my career and I sat there and I said to somebody, “Wow, she is such a *****.” The lawyer. And there was another psychologist, and she said to me, “Exactly, that’s her job. She’s doing her job.” And I thought, “Wow, OK.” We need to understand that this is a professional goal and this is not personal. 

Noah Bolmer: Before we wrap up, do you have any last advice for experts, and in particular, newer expert witnesses or attorneys that are working with newer expert misses? 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: For me it’s been very difficult to know my worth and my value, and I’ve had to learn that over time. I have $500,000 of student loan debt, and I am worth more than an hourly fee. My name is worth something as well. So as soon as my name is entered and people are aware I’m a part of that case, the money starts to accrue. And so, I had to learn that it feels weird to take money from people who need your help. It feels horrible to take money from vulnerable people, but I also have earned it and I’m good at my job and I have to remind myself of that. And then I also really like to remind myself how much lawyers make. I don’t get a percent. 

Noah Bolmer: Absolutely. Dr. Dobson, thank you so much for joining me here today. 

Dr. Leslie Dobson: Thank you for having me. 

Noah Bolmer: And as always, thank you to our listeners for joining me for another episode of Engaging Experts. Cheers. 

Dr. Leslie Dobson, Clinical and Forensic Psychologist

Dr. Leslie Dobson, is a clinical and forensic psychologist with a private practice. She is an expert in forensic psychology focusing on civil law and forensic evaluations for sexual abuse allegations. Dr. Dobson holds a Doctor of Psychology from Loma Linda University.