Expert Witness

Expert Witnesses are key to Cases involving digital marketing. These cases often hinge on questions that look simple and are not: whether an ad actually reached the audience it claimed, how a platform’s algorithm ranked or suppressed content, what a website was collecting about its visitors, or whether an influencer arrangement was disclosed and monetized the way the parties say it was. Dan Stratford is retained to answer those questions and to explain the answers in terms a court can use.

He has spent more than 30 years inside these systems, starting in the mid-1990s before Google existed, and has run them at scale as a Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, and agency owner managing multi-million-dollar monthly advertising budgets. That operating history matters on cross-examination. His opinions rest on platform documentation, industry standards, and hands-on functional testing that can be reproduced, not on secondhand familiarity with tools he has never administered.

His matters have involved online advertising systems, platform algorithms, search engine optimization and paid search practices, influencer and affiliate monetization, social media conduct, eCommerce operations, website data collection, user tracking, and visitor identification technologies, including intellectual property disputes touching copyright, trademark, trade dress, and patent claims. He has served in both consulting and testifying capacities in state, federal, and international proceedings, producing expert reports, declarations, functional testing analysis, and deposition-ready opinions.

He also has unusual experience translating this material for lawyers specifically. At LexisNexis/Martindale-Hubbell he taught digital marketing to attorneys through Certified Legal Education programs across multiple states. He remains operationally active today, personally running digital strategy for a national sports organization, which keeps his knowledge of current platform behavior first-hand rather than historical.