About Me

My photo
Civil appellate, criminal appellate, and criminal trial lawyer at 704 North Thompson Street, #157, Conroe, Texas 77301-2578, (936) 494-1393.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

How and When to Challenge the Admissibility of an Expert's Opinion at Trial

An extremely good blog post on how to impeach an expert witness of the kind most lawyers will encounter- the somewhat credentialed person who no longer is fully engaged in his or her field, but whose business is, generally, limited to testifying at trials is here.
They don't talk about the appellate angle in attacking experts. Professional testifiers are often persuasive to juries and trial judges, but are much less impressive when judged on a cold record. I practice in southeast Texas. In the First, Ninth, and Fourteenth Courts of Appeals and in the Texas Supreme Court a personal injury plaintiff's expert is guilty until proven innocent, so defense counsel in such a case should practically always make a Daubert/Robinson challenge to the adversary's expert. In a sexually-violent-predator civil-commitment case, Judge Seiler will be very open to an attack on the defense expert, less so for his appellate court, the Ninth, in Beaumont, as I've written about elsewhere on this blog.

No comments:

Post a Comment