Michael Talve wanted to go skiing. His parents did not ski. For most teenagers, this would have been the beginning of a protracted negotiation at the kitchen table. Talve assembled a travel business instead: a coach bus, places to stay, group lift tickets and weekend packages he could sell to classmates. He was about thirteen or fourteen. Before he could drive himself to the mountain, he could arrange transport for everyone else.
There is a useful miniature of his career in that story. Somebody wants access to something. The pieces exist, scattered among people who have other things to do. Talve puts them together, handles the arrangements and gives the customer a reason to come back. The teenage version involved lift tickets. The adult version involves lawyers, expert witnesses and the uncomfortable possibility that an impressive résumé leaves out something important.
Today, Talve is the founder and chief executive of Expert Institute, based in New York. His business sits in the space between a legal problem and the specialist who can help explain it. It is a peculiar kind of matchmaking: credentials matter, availability matters, and an inconvenient opinion from years ago can matter very much indeed.
A business education, with soap
Talve attended Babson College from 2003 to 2007 and earned a Bachelor of Science. He chose a school where entrepreneurship was central. His interests ranged across industries; running a business was the thread that held them together. Accounting, finance, marketing and organizational development offered a practical education for someone who wanted the freedom to pursue different opportunities.
One of those opportunities arrived in a form considerably easier to fit on a shelf than legal research. During his senior year, he wrote a business plan for VIVO Natural Products. The company sold soap, including through Whole Foods. His earlier experience included work at a mortgage bank and a private equity business connected with consumer brands such as FIJI Water and POM Wonderful.
The VIVO pitch was straightforward: good ingredients, a good product and a price customers could afford. Consumer goods make a founder confront unromantic questions. What does the customer actually receive? Where will they find it? Why should they choose it again? Soap is an unusually firm reply to the entrepreneur who would prefer to live entirely inside a business plan.
Talve’s path into expert services carried that interest in different businesses with it. A founder who enjoys understanding unfamiliar industries has a reason to like work that changes with the next case. In this occupation, the next phone call can require an entirely different body of knowledge.
The résumé is only the beginning
Expert Institute traces its beginnings to 2010. By 2014, Talve was describing a familiar professional frustration: useful information existed, but it was difficult to organize and retrieve. His company collected information about expert witnesses and their track records, then used researchers and technology to match them with the requirements of a particular case.
“There’s a lot of great data and information for attorneys to take advantage of,” he said in 2014. The commercial opportunity was in making that material usable. The company also introduced a video preview so lawyers could see prospective experts explain their qualifications before engaging them. A professional biography can tell you a person’s specialty. A conversation begins to reveal whether that person can explain it.
That distinction gives Talve’s work its texture. A lawyer needs someone with relevant knowledge, but must also understand how the specialist’s experience fits the question at hand. A long career creates evidence of ability and a long trail to examine. Finding the name starts the work; examining the fit takes it further.
- 01Who knows?Find expertise relevant to the case.
- 02What is their record?Examine prior work and testimony.
- 03Does it fit?Give the attorney evidence to assess.
An editorial explanation of the matching and research process.
The company’s stated approach challenges reliance on static directories and familiar referrals. Aggregating information across specialties lets its team look beyond the names already circulating in a lawyer’s immediate network. For Talve, access is a business problem with a practical answer: assemble information and people in a form that a busy professional can use.
He interviews the interviewers, too
The business requires judgments about people inside the company as well. In an account of his hiring process, Talve described beginning with résumés, moving to video interviews and bringing selected applicants in to meet the team. Colleagues could ask about hobbies, travel and working habits. Their reservations went into a log to revisit a hundred days after a hire.
One candidate joined a video interview from a sandwich shop, wearing an old T-shirt and using a poor connection. Talve remembered the setting as evidence of preparation and professionalism. An interview, in his telling, provided a small rehearsal for how someone might appear before a client. The lunch counter had inadvertently become an audition room.
He also wanted to understand motivation. “Why do you work so hard?” was a question he used. He valued answers about providing for family or contributing to a community. This was a founder explaining the kind of colleagues he wanted: capable people with a reason to care about the work beyond their next purchase.
That care had to become organizational rather than personal. Talve later described an early period when he handled reception, sales, research, accounting and recruitment himself. As the company expanded, he had to become more of a coach. The founder’s calendar is a fairly unforgiving accounting system: every task retained is time unavailable for another decision.
“As CEO, I’ve learned to be a better coach.”
Michael Talve, 2020
When the service became software
Spectrum Equity became an investor in 2017. The company described the investment as its first institutional capital, intended to support operations, wider practice coverage and product expansion. Talve pointed to Spectrum’s experience with subscription information services. The choice of partner reflected a business increasingly concerned with organizing information as well as making introductions.
Outside capital also brought additional experience into the boardroom. The announced directors included Spectrum’s Mike Farrell and Jake Heller, alongside information-services executive Jennifer Kitchen and operating adviser Jim Emling. For a founder who had once performed nearly every job, building a company now involved choosing people who could help it work beyond his individual reach.
In 2020, Expert iQ added a software home for expert casework, communications and scheduling. The company also shortened its public name from The Expert Institute to Expert Institute. Removing an article was a modest piece of editing. Giving clients a place to manage continuing work was a more consequential change: the relationship could extend through a case rather than end at an introduction.
Revenue growth during Spectrum Equity’s investment, as reported by Spectrum at the sale.
By September 2024, Spectrum reported that revenue had nearly quintupled during its ownership period. It highlighted the investment in Expert iQ as part of the company’s development. The figure describes a business over seven years, with customers, staff and products accumulating around the original search service.
A witness comes with a history
Expert Radar extended the inquiry from finding an expert to examining one. By 2024, Talve was discussing a product that assembled professional and litigation histories, including testimony, challenges and related documents. His stated ambition was to make this depth of information accessible to smaller law firms as well as large ones.
A product demonstration with legal journalist Bob Ambrogi in October 2024 made the practical questions explicit. How do you distinguish people with similar names? How often is the information updated? How can a user assess whether a search missed something? Those questions are revealing. A research product earns its place through the quality and relevance of what it returns.
The demonstration covered publications, media appearances and litigation activity, giving viewers a way to examine the product’s work. It also offered a look at Talve explaining the service himself. The founder remained close enough to the details to discuss the ordinary difficulties behind the polished interface: identity, recency and completeness.
Levine Leichtman Capital Partners acquired Expert Institute from Spectrum on September 30, 2024, in partnership with management. Talve continued leading the company and retained significant equity. Management advisers separately described his team’s reinvestment into the new ownership structure. The sale changed the financial partnership while leaving him involved in the work ahead.
The next arrangement
In June 2025, Expert Institute acquired ExpertConnect Litigation Support. Its network added expertise in regulatory, commercial and intellectual property disputes. Founder Eric Broyles remained involved as a shareholder and strategic adviser. The combination expanded the people and specialisms available to clients, alongside the technology used to manage their engagement.
Talve was also included in the 2025 Lawdragon 100 Global Leaders in Legal Strategy & Consulting, listed as a litigation consultant in New York. The description fits a career built around the infrastructure of legal work: finding people, organizing their histories and helping lawyers approach decisions with more information.
By October 2026, his argument about competitive advantage had become pointed. Technology moves quickly, he observed, while years of information about expert performance and relationships on both sides of the market take time to accumulate. “Capital alone can’t replace that,” he said. His expectation was that consolidation would continue as larger platforms gained business from smaller referral firms.
There is a pleasing continuity here. The equipment has changed from buses and lift tickets to research platforms and corporate transactions. The attraction remains access: finding the right people, sorting the arrangements and making a complicated undertaking possible for someone else. Talve’s first customers wanted a weekend in the mountains. He had already discovered a way to get them there.