TASA is connecting experts with lawyers
TASA has connected lawyers with experts for 60 years
Providing expert testimony has become routine strategy for lawyers in all manner of cases these days.
From automotive to construction to biomechanics, there are experts for everything, and The TASA Group has been rounding up the masterminds for 60 years now.
Providing expert testimony has become routine strategy for lawyers in all manner of cases these days, but Jay Rosen never quite imagined he was building an empire when he and his late business partner Ed Sherman “walked the gangplank” into a brand new endeavor in 1956.
The men, both Temple University graduates with degrees in psychology, had launched a business that provided psychological testing for potential employees, when a fateful phone call altered their entrepreneurial game plan completely.
“Having just come out of four years in the Navy, my job prospects were dim,” recalled Rosen, now TASA’s chairman of the board. “I was newly married with a baby on the way. Ed was in the same situation, so we pooled our resources and went into this business to do psychological testing. A maritime lawyer happened to call us and he needed an expert to examine the safety of a gangplank on a ship in the Delaware River. Someone had been injured coming off the gangplank and it was a situation of examining the safety issues at high tide, low tide.”
It turned out that a naval officer in search of employment opportunities who had come to Rosen and Sherman for testing was the perfect guy for the temporary job.
“Our expert got paid a couple hundred bucks, we got paid 20 bucks and we thought nothing of it,” Rosen said.
A casual business lunch a few months later, however, got the men thinking about it again when they learned that their maritime expert referral was just the tip of the iceberg; lawyers were apparently always looking for all kinds of experts to testify.
Soon they were registering a name for their new venture, Technical Advisory Service for Lawyers, which was changed to Technical Advisory Service for Attorneys (TASA) in 1964, and sending out letters to hundreds of law offices in the city.
“And then the phone started ringing,” Rosen said.
“We were both teaching part-time then at Pierce Business School (now Pierce College), so we knew a lot of people in academia and it was easy for us to recruit experts, and the business really took off,” Rosen noted. “The concept was that we would provide an expert on anything for any legitimate request.”
Within a few years the business was doing so well the men abandoned the testing end of the company and concentrated solely on building Technical Advisory Service, said Rosen, who allowed that he and his partner were essentially pioneering a new field.
“There were a few businesses doing it at the time, but they were in very specialized areas, like engineering,” he remembered.
“With 20,000 attorneys in Manhattan, we got the idea of opening an office there, and we turned out to be quite successful in New York City,” Rosen said. “We now operate in all of the U.S. and Canada and overseas.”
From the first Philadelphia office in the Market
“For the BP oil spill we provided experts on shellfish and the conditions of how the shellfish industry was affected by the spill. For the 9/11 case, for workers who got sick with pulmonary issues, we provided a whole host of experts, from occupational safety to medical experts, on the connections between what they were exposed to at the World Trade Center.” — TASA CEO Melinda “Mindy” Sungenis
Street National Bank Building, the company moved to Walnut Street and, ultimately to its current location at 1166 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell, in 1989.
Over the years, cases have involved many highprofile investigations, including the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks at the World Trade Center in New York, noted CEO Melinda “Mindy” Sungenis, who has been with the company for more than 30 years.
“For the BP oil spill we provided experts on shellfish and the conditions of how the shellfish industry was affected by the spill,” Sungenis said. “For the 9/11 case, for workers who got sick with pulmonary issues, we provided a whole host of experts, from occupational safety to medical experts, on the connections between what they were exposed to at the World Trade Center.”
With attorneys still making up the bulk of TASA clients, many media folks on tight deadlines now rely on TASA-style expertise, she added.
“We usually have to respond very quickly, which is what we’re uniquely positioned to do, because so many experts that work with us know that when we call they need to respond quickly and that’s why we’re able to provide our clients with exceptional service and why we’re the still the industry leader after 60 years,” Sungenis said.
TASA never offers assistance to both sides of a case, Rosen pointed out.
“Early on, we made the decision that if an attorney calls us the implicit understanding is that we will provide the best possible expert we can. So if a plaintiff attorney calls us first and three weeks later the defense attorney calls, we will not serve the other side.”
With a staff of roughly 40 employees and around 25,000 carefully screened independent experts in any specialty imaginable at is fingertips, TASA has evolved dramatically from that gangplank that led to the unanticipated growth.
“Sixty years later we’re at the point where we understand what an attorney needs for any kind of case and our ability to provide one or more experts to that attorney is probably better than anybody else’s in the business,” Rosen said. “We recognized early on that we’re in the service business and the way to build on that is to provide, good, honest, fast service … and that’s what we’re trying to do every day.”
For more information, visit www.Tasanet.com or call 610-275-8272.