For those who litigate medical malpractice cases, it is common to encounter complicated issues involving multiple, overlapping areas of practice, specialty and subspecialty. Any individual defendant can have several experts in multiple subspecialties rendering targeted opinions. One subspecialty for causation and another for standard of care or damages. Objections are often made when questioning an expert about opinions not expressly stated in his or her report. But, objections such as these, at a discovery deposition, are baseless. As set forth below, it is incumbent on the questioning attorney to insist on a thorough examination of every opinion of the opposition expert.
Many times, defendants have reports from experts in areas of expertise outside of that defendant’s field. It is often the case that the reports of these various experts will be specifically limited and tailored so as not to point a finger or lay blame on any codefendant. Whether this is a tacit or explicit understanding between the defendants, the posture commonly appears to be that if neither I, nor my experts say anything bad about my co-defendants, my co-defendants and their experts will not say anything bad about me.
