Civil Litigation-Experts
An expert witness is simply a witness who has expertise in a particular area, whose testimony the court has determined may assist the jury in understanding the issues of the case and therefore fairly deciding the issues. Expert testimony has been abused over the years in that it is sometimes presented on issues that do not require expert testimony. The rule of thumb for the admissibility of expert testimony is that it must relate to a subject matter that the jury might have difficulty understanding without expert testimony. The expert must assist the jury in understanding the issue. In a medical malpractice case in which there is an issue as to whether the surgery should have been conducted one way or another, the jury needs to hear expert testimony from medical doctors as to how the surgery should have been conducted. The jury does not have the expertise to decide that issue on its own, and therefore must hear from medical experts who will educate the jurors as to what the medical issues are and how the surgery either should have or should not have been conducted. It is then up to the jury to decide which of those experts they believe and to render a verdict.
Certain types of expert testimony have been ruled inadmissible by some courts. For instance, in some jurisdictions, expert testimony of how a particular automobile accident may have occurred is considered to be inadmissible because that is normally considered to be something that a jury can understand and determine on its own, without the aid of expert testimony.
There is a tendency within the legal profession to offer expert testimony on as many issues as possible in order to bolster the claim or defense being asserted. Recently, many courts have taken a somewhat dim view of that tendency and have endeavored to restrict the admissibility of expert testimony. The reasoning is that in many of these types of cases, the jury has sufficient expertise or common sense to understand and resolve the issues.
