Compliance is the least glamorous part of the expert network industry and the part that determines whether the industry gets to exist. Every serious network says it screens engagements. Far fewer clients know what that screening should actually contain — which makes it hard to tell a real program from a reassuring paragraph on a website. This article explains what the screening is for and what a defensible process looks like, so you can evaluate ours or anyone else's.
The core risk: MNPI
Material non-public information is any information that a reasonable investor would consider important to a decision and that isn't publicly available — an unannounced clinical trial result, an unreported revenue number, a pending contract loss. If an expert passes MNPI to an investor who then trades on it, that's potential insider trading exposure for the investor, the expert, and, reputationally at least, the network that made the introduction. The screening exists to make that transfer as close to impossible as process can make it.
In practice, prevention happens at several points:
- Topic definition.The engagement is scoped in writing before anyone is contacted, so “what's your company's unannounced pipeline?” never becomes a bookable topic in the first place.
- Eligibility rules. Certain pairings are refused outright — most obviously, a current employee of a public company speaking about that company to an investor. Recency rules extend this: someone who left last month often knows things that are still material and still non-public.
- Expert attestation and briefing.Before the call, the expert confirms what they can't discuss — confidential information from any employer, anything covered by an NDA — and both sides are reminded of the boundaries at the top of the conversation.
- Escalation.When a request sits in a gray zone, a human with authority to say no reviews it. The word “no” being genuinely available is what separates a compliance function from a formality.
Reg FD, briefly
Regulation FD stops public companies from selectively disclosing material information to some investors before others. For expert networks it means extra care whenever the proposed expert is a current officer, employee, or close affiliate of a public company: the safe structure is usually to find a former employee, a customer, a competitor, or an independent specialist instead — someone whose knowledge is experiential rather than privileged.
Healthcare adds a second rulebook
Life sciences is where expert networks do some of their most valuable work and where a generic screening process quietly fails. Three extra layers apply:
- Sunshine Act / Open Payments. In the US, payments from pharmaceutical and device manufacturers to physicians are reportable. When the client is a manufacturer, an honorarium for a consultation can be a reportable transfer of value — the network needs to know when reporting obligations are triggered and support them, not discover the rule afterward.
- Off-label boundaries.Conversations touching unapproved uses of approved drugs have to be structured so that a research discussion can't be construed as promotion, particularly when a manufacturer is in the room.
- Clinical confidentiality. Trial investigators and site staff hold data under agreements that survive long after a study ends; patient-level information is off-limits entirely. Screening healthcare experts means knowing these obligations exist and scoping around them.
What screening can't do
Honesty requires saying this: no process makes a conversation risk-free. Screening reduces the probability of a problem and creates a documented record that everyone took the rules seriously — which matters enormously if a question is ever raised — but the final safeguard is always the people on the call behaving as briefed. A network that promises zero risk is describing marketing, not compliance.
Questions to ask any expert network
- Who performs screening — in-house staff or an outsourced service — and what are their qualifications?
- Does screening happen before an expert appears on my shortlist, or after I pick one?
- What categories of expert will you refuse outright, and can I see the policy?
- How do you handle Sunshine Act reporting when the client is a manufacturer?
- What records are kept per engagement, and for how long?
Any network with a real program can answer these in specifics within a day. If the answers are slow or vague, that tells you what you need to know. Ours are on the compliance pages, and we're happy to walk through them live.