What Opposing Counsel Actually Tests Your Expert On
TL;DR
- •Opposing counsel rarely challenges a CV. They challenge whether the expert still practices, whether they practiced in the same setting as the case, and whether they're a true subspecialty match.
- •A retired or administrative physician, an academic reviewing frontline community care, or an adjacent specialist writing outside their lane can all produce a clean report that doesn't hold up under cross.
- •Our physician-led team treats expert matching as the decision that determines whether a case is trial-ready — not a formality that happens after the report is written.
· · Article
If a med mal case gets anywhere near a courtroom, opposing counsel is going to test whether your expert actually belongs on the stand. Most attorneys assume that challenge lands on the CV — board certification, years of practice, a long publication list. It almost never does.
It lands on three things, and all three are decided the day the expert is chosen, long before the deposition.
Currency
Is this person still doing the work, right now. An expert who retired years ago, or moved into administration, can have an impressive CV and still go quiet when asked when they last managed a case like this one. Juries notice the pause. So does opposing counsel, and they'll spend their cross-examination widening it.
Setting
A big-name academic opining on what a community ER physician should have done at three in the morning, alone, with a full waiting room, is exposed to a straightforward argument: that they're judging the case against a standard of care that doesn't exist where it actually happened. Setting isn't a footnote. It's often the standard itself.
Subspecialty
This is the one that gets missed most. A general cardiologist reviewing an electrophysiology case. A general surgeon weighing in on something that belonged to vascular. Close enough to produce a clean, competent-looking report. Not close enough to survive an hour of cross.
Why this is a matching problem, not a review problem
None of this is about the quality of the opinion once it's written. A well-credentialed, well-intentioned expert can still fall apart on the stand if the match was wrong from the start — wrong currency, wrong setting, or wrong subspecialty. By the time that shows up, it's usually too late to fix.
This is why our physician-led team treats expert matching as the first decision in a case, not a formality after the fact. Every match is evaluated against the same three questions we'd expect opposing counsel to ask: Does this expert still do this work? Did they practice in this setting? Is this actually their subspecialty, or just adjacent to it?
Getting that right doesn't just produce a stronger opinion. It produces an opinion that's still standing after opposing counsel sits back down.