Contact Bill Hartzer

What a first message should contain

• The names of the parties, their parent and affiliated entities, the agencies or consultants involved, and counsel on both sides. This is what the conflict check runs against.
• The nature of the dispute, in a sentence or two, in general terms.
• Which advertising platforms the spend ran on, and the approximate date range in question.
• Who holds access to the advertising and analytics accounts today, if you know.
• The procedural posture and any date already fixed — a discovery cutoff, an expert disclosure deadline, a hearing.
• Whether you are looking for a testifying expert, consulting support, or a response to an opinion already served.

That is enough for me to tell you whether there is anything worth discussing, and it is short enough to write in five minutes.

What not to send yet

Not pleadings. Not discovery productions. Not deposition transcripts. Not the other side's expert report. Nothing privileged, nothing subject to a protective order, and no account credentials. As a working rule: no attachments in a first message.

Ordinary email is not a secure channel, and a first message goes to someone who has not yet been cleared to receive your case material. Once the conflict check clears and an engagement is agreed, there is a proper way to transfer documents, and it is not an attachment to an introductory email.

What a conflict check is, and why it comes first

It is a comparison of the names you send against every party I have worked for or against, in testimony and in ordinary consulting work alike. A prior operating engagement for a party is as much a conflict as a prior retention against one.

It runs before anything else because if a conflict exists, the right outcome is that I never saw your material — and that is only achievable if the material was never sent. Names by themselves disclose nothing about your theory of the case, so beginning there gives away nothing.

What happens next

I confirm receipt and run the check. If it clears, the next step is a short call, kept general enough that it stays outside your privileged work until an engagement exists: what the dispute turns on, how much of the account record is likely to have survived, and whether an examination of that record can reach the question you need answered.

If the check does not clear, or if the matter is one where the account data cannot get you where you need to go, I will say so plainly and quickly. That answer costs you nothing, and it is sometimes the most useful thing I can offer.

Or write directly: [email protected]