Baltimore Injury Lawyer Blog

This one is courtesy of Dorothy Clay Sims. We often see expert witnesses with resumes three feet thick, full of impressive-sounding credentials like faculty appointments, society memberships, and consulting gigs.  Most lawyers start off experts with a long recitation of their knowledge, skill, experience, training and or education.  This is unadulterated effort to impress the jury.  The expert is saying, I’m crazy smart and qualified and you should listen and believe what I’m telling you. Most experts that testify sound great on background.  I’m rarely not wildly impressed.

Bloated Resumes Look Bad

But what if that resume is a lot of puff.  If you can prove it is just a little puff, it tears down the veneer of credibility the expert is trying to build.  Often, it pays just to ask. Just recently, I found three inaccuracies on a defense expert’s C.V.

As you can tell by some of my recent blog posts, I have been spending a lot of time lately cross-examining defense medical experts. Today I want to talk about using defense experts to bring in favorable opinions.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a hotel in Houston, Texas. I’m here for depositions of some out of town medical experts. So I thought I would share a great tip for cross-examining defense medical experts: Use their own ethics code against them.

Nearly every medical expert belongs to some sort of professional group that has an ethics code. The American Medical Association, American College of Surgeons, the American Psychological Association, and American Association of Neurology all have their own ethics rules. So do most other medical professional groups. Sometimes they even have specific guidelines for giving expert testimony. These can be great fodder for cross.

Most of their members are aware these ethics rules exist but are unfamiliar with their content. If they have ever read them at all, it was usually years ago. But they really have no choice but to admit that the rules exist and that they are governed by them. I mean really, who would refuse to admit to being subject to their own professional group’s ethics rules?

There is really no way to be a competent personal injury lawyer without spending an awful lot of time reading medical records. Poring through stacks of records is boring, time-consuming, and we are all faced with an ever-increasing list of seemingly more important things to get done.

Many lawyers have a paralegal read and summarize these records (if anyone reads them at all) because a) they don’t want to do it; b) they think their time is too valuable to spend on it; and c) they don’t want to do it. Did I mention they don’t want to do it? I did? Good.

I am not one of them, although I have an excellent paralegal who usually does a run-through of the records and attaches a cover memo pointing out entries of interest. This is very helpful, but I read them all myself every single time, and create my own contemporaneous notes. Not just the records generated as a result of treating the injury my case is about, but also any prior medical records I can get my hands on.

I recently wrote about a problem we are seeing more and more often in car and truck accident injury cases- mismatched experts designated by defendants. What we mean by “mismatched experts” is that the expert identified by the defendant appears to be of the wrong type, or in the wrong field.

I had this situation recently in a car crash case. My client had a shoulder injury. Specifically, an AC joint separation that required surgery. The main issue in the case was whether the shoulder surgery was causally related to the car crash. My expert witness was one of the treating doctors- a local orthopedist who specializes in upper extremity surgery. This doctor is known as one of the top shoulder specialists in the area.

The defense did what would seem like the natural thing to do- it named an orthopedist as an expert witness. The problem was that the orthopedist the defense chose limits his practice to spine surgery and does not treat shoulder problems at all.  Why do they do this?  Cynically, I’ll tell you that most of these insurance companies would rather have an expert that they know will offer any testimony that they want.  They would rather have someone who is barely qualified to testify that they have paid well over the years than to hire someone who might slip and give a truly impartial opinion.