Round Table Group is not, at first glance, an obvious subject for a collection built around fountain pens and historical craftsmanship. It is a business — a company that finds expert witnesses for attorneys. But look closer, and the connection is direct. Round Table Group is the company that made everything else in The Scholars’ Treasure possible: the memoir that tells its story, and the collection of pens that now honors the scholars and thinkers who shaped it.
What does it take to build trust between two worlds — the world of specialized knowledge and the world of law? That question sits at the center of Round Table Group’s history, and it’s worth answering before going any further into the story The Scholars’ Treasure has to tell.
The company began in 1993, when Russ Rosenzweig and a small group of friends at Northwestern University set out to solve a much smaller problem than the one they eventually solved. Their original idea was modest: help academics find consulting work, so professors could put their expertise to use beyond the classroom.
Attorneys had other plans. Once litigators discovered that a well-organized network of professors and specialists existed, they started calling — not for consulting, but for expert witnesses. What began as a side project for helping academics earn extra income turned, almost by accident, into the foundation of an entirely new industry: expert witness search and referral.
Round Table Group leaned into that shift, and over the following decades became known as one of the pioneers of the field, credited by some observers with laying early groundwork for what we now recognize as the broader gig economy — professionals offering specialized skills on a project basis, matched to the people who need them.
At its core, Round Table Group locates, vets, and refers qualified expert witnesses to litigators handling cases across nearly every field imaginable — from engineering and medicine to finance and technology. The firm also produces expert background reports and helps attorneys engage the right specialist for a given practice area, serving law firms both nationally and internationally.
The value the firm provides is less about size and more about precision: finding not just any expert, but the right expert, for a case where credibility and clarity can decide the outcome.
Before firms like Round Table Group existed, attorneys largely relied on their own networks — essentially, a well-worn Rolodex — to track down expert witnesses. The process was slow, inconsistent, and dependent on who an attorney happened to already know.
Round Table Group’s approach changed that. By building a large, organized pool of vetted professors and industry specialists, the firm gave litigators a faster, more reliable way to find credible expertise, while giving academics and professionals a structured way to put their knowledge to work outside their usual roles. Over three decades, that pool grew from a modest founding group into a network of professionals spanning nearly every discipline.
It’s a business built on a simple insight: expertise is valuable, but only when the right person with that expertise can be found by the right person who needs it.
There’s a discipline to this work that’s easy to overlook from the outside. Locating an expert witness isn’t simply a matter of keyword-matching a resume to a case file. It requires understanding the nuances of a legal argument, the credibility standards a court will expect, and the specific way a specialist’s background will hold up under cross-examination.
Round Table Group has described the relationship between litigator and expert witness as a partnership in the pursuit of truth, rather than a simple transaction. That framing says something about the values behind the business: precision, trust, and service, applied not to an object, but to a process.
Russ Rosenzweig earned his undergraduate degree in economics from Northwestern University and later an MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business — credentials that mattered less, by his own account, than the accidental discovery he and his college friends made in that dorm room in 1993.
The company’s path hasn’t been a straight line. At one point, Round Table Group was sold to Thomson Reuters, a Fortune 500 company — a milestone that might have closed the story for most founders. Instead, Russ later bought the company back, choosing to keep building rather than let someone else finish what he’d started.
More than three decades later, Russ remains CEO, and the company’s anniversary became the occasion for something unexpected: a memoir, The Scholars’ Treasure, recounting the entrepreneurial journey behind Round Table Group, alongside a collection of Montblanc pens honoring the scholars and thinkers who shaped his path along the way.
“The re-acquisition of Round Table Group stood as the pinnacle of my newfound faith – a testament to the power of prayer and the divine orchestration of destiny.” Rosenzweig 2025, 220.
A few threads run through this story that apply well beyond the expert witness industry.
Those are the same instincts, at bottom, that led Russ to eventually write a memoir and build a collection of pens honoring the thinkers who influenced him: a willingness to follow curiosity past the original plan, and to take seriously the idea that some things are worth preserving.
Trust between specialized knowledge and the legal system doesn’t build itself. It takes decades of consistent, careful work — the kind that rarely makes headlines, but that quietly holds up the credibility of court cases across the country. Preserving that story, in a memoir and in a collection of objects meant to honor the scholars behind it, is one way of acknowledging that the work itself deserves to be remembered.
Round Table Group is where this story starts, but it isn’t where it ends. Readers who want the fuller account of how a dorm-room idea became a decades-long business — and how that business eventually inspired a memoir and a collection of Montblanc pens honoring history’s great scholars — can explore The Scholars’ Treasure directly: read the book, visit the Collection, or browse the growing library of Collection Essays exploring the figures behind each pen.
Every business starts as a guess about what people need. Ours was wrong at first — we thought we were helping professors find consulting work, and instead we ended up building something the legal world didn’t know it needed. I’ve spent more than thirty years since then learning that the guess matters less than what you’re willing to do once you find out you were wrong.
What is Round Table Group?
Round Table Group is an expert witness search and referral firm founded in 1993 that connects litigators with qualified expert witnesses across virtually every professional field.
Who founded Round Table Group, and when?
Russ Rosenzweig and a group of Northwestern University classmates founded the company in 1993, originally intending to help academics find consulting work.
What does an expert witness search and referral firm actually do?
It locates, vets, and refers credible expert witnesses to attorneys handling litigation, along with related services like expert background reports.
How is Round Table Group connected to The Scholars’ Treasure?
Round Table Group is Russ Rosenzweig’s company, and its founding story is the basis for his memoir, The Scholars’ Treasure, which in turn inspired his collection of Montblanc pens.
What is The Scholars’ Treasure?
The Scholars’ Treasure is Russ Rosenzweig’s memoir chronicling the founding and growth of Round Table Group, paired with a curated collection of Montblanc pens honoring historical scholars and leaders.
How do attorneys typically find expert witnesses?
Historically, attorneys relied on personal networks to locate expert witnesses. Search and referral firms like Round Table Group now offer a faster, more structured alternative.
Where can I see The Scholars’ Treasure Collection in person?
The Collection can be visited in Newport Beach, California — details are available on The Scholars’ Treasure website.
Round Table Group began as a guess about what academics needed, and became, almost by accident, the foundation of an entire industry built on trust between expertise and the law. That story — patient, improvisational, and still unfolding after more than three decades — is also the reason The Scholars’ Treasure exists at all. It’s a fitting place to start exploring the rest of the Collection.
Rosenzweig, Russ W. 2025. The Scholars’ Treasure: The Secret Origins of the Expert Witness Industry. Newport Beach, CA: Self-published.
Russ Rosenzweig
Entrepreneur, Author, Philanthropist, Collector
Discover an unforgettable evening celebrating storytelling, craftsmanship, and the enduring legacy of the written word.
Join entrepreneur, author, and collector Russ Rosenzweig as he shares the inspiration behind The Scholars’ Treasure, his memoir, and one of America’s most remarkable private collections of Montblanc writing instruments. Through personal stories and extraordinary writing instruments, Russ explores the connections between entrepreneurship, history, artistry, and the experiences that shape a meaningful life.
Whether you’re passionate about fine writing instruments, memoirs, entrepreneurship, or the preservation of history, this presentation offers a unique perspective on how remarkable objects can preserve remarkable stories.
Whether you arrived through entrepreneurship, collecting, leadership, literature, or simple curiosity, Russ invites you to continue exploring The Scholars’ Treasure.
Every page, every writing instrument, and every story represents another opportunity to learn from the past while inspiring the future.
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