Expert insights, legal technology trends, and best practices for working with expert witnesses
Category: Big-Picture Perspectives on Expert Witness Practice - The expert's fee note is the most visible cost of expert evidence and usually the smallest one. The real cost hides in counsel hours, hearing delay, and lost negotiating leverage, driven by three compounding patterns: late instruction, oversized reports, and last-minute tactics. This piece traces the mechanics and where the money actually goes.
Category: Big-Picture Perspectives on Expert Witness Practice - Common law systems test expert evidence through party appointment and cross-examination. Civil law systems favor court-appointed neutral experts tested largely in writing. This piece breaks down both traditions, the hybrid practices international arbitration has built from them, and the pitfalls practitioners hit when they assume one system's rules apply everywhere.
Tribunals believe they are managing the expert process well. Experts and counsel often describe the same case as under-directed. Both are right, because each side is measuring "proactive" against a different baseline: procedural thoroughness versus substantive technical engagement. This piece unpacks why the gap exists and the low-risk practices that close it.
In December 2017, a Nashville nurse named RaDonda Vaught pulled the wrong medication from an automated dispensing cabinet, administered it to a patient waiting for a routine imaging scan, and then reported her own error to her supervisors as soon as she realized what had happened. The patient, Charlene Murphey, died. Four years later, Vaught did not face a quiet nursing board hearing or a civil malpractice claim settled by an insurer. She faced a jury in a criminal courtroom, was convicted of criminally negligent homicide, and was sentenced to three years of probation. Nurses across the country watched the verdict with something close to alarm. If a self-reported medication error could end in a criminal conviction, what did that mean for the millions of nurses making split-second decisions in emergency departments, ICUs, and nursing homes every single day? And just as urgently for the legal system: who was actually qualified to stand in front of a jury and explain what had really happened inside that decision? That question sits at the center of one of the more consequential and least understood shifts happening in medical malpractice litigation right now. It also explains why so many malpractice cases today hinge less on a single dramatic decision and more on the accumulated judgment calls of the nurses who spend the most hours at a patient's bedside. For years, nursing conduct was frequently evaluated in court by physicians, reviewed on paper by attorneys with no clinical background, or folded into a broader "standard of care" argument that treated hospital care as a single undifferentiated mass rather than the layered, interdisciplinary system it actually is. Nursing is its own profession, with its own licensing exams, its own scope of practice, and its own standard of care. It is not a subordinate branch of medicine, and it cannot be judged by physician logic. As hospitals lean harder on protocols, electronic documentation, and nurse-driven triage, and as prosecutors show a new willingness to bring criminal charges over what were once treated as reportable clinical errors, nursing experts are moving from a peripheral courtroom presence to one of the most consequential voices in medical litigation. This article draws on conversations from On The Stand with Ashish Arun, featuring a triple board-certified emergency and trauma nurse, a colorectal surgeon, a pediatric emergency medicine physician, a physician who built an expert-referral practice, a personal injury trial attorney with four decades of experience, a chiropractic expert witness, and a medical librarian who supports legal nurse consultants directly. None of them practice in exactly the same corner of medicine or law, yet their accounts converge on the same conclusion from different directions: nursing malpractice cases now turn on nursing expertise, nursing documentation, and an entire support ecosystem that has grown up specifically to serve it.
Category: Big-Picture Perspectives on Expert Witness Practice - Most expert evidence does not fail because the underlying analysis was wrong. It fails at one of four predictable, avoidable moments: a communication breakdown with counsel, a timing misstep, a clarity failure in the report, or mismanagement at the hearing stage. This piece breaks down each failure point, how they compound, and the low-cost fix for each.
The expert disclosure framework of Wyoming reflects a carefully engineered system that balances transparency, reliability, and procedural fairness across multiple dimensions.
Category: Big-Picture Perspectives on Expert Witness Practice - The expert witness is paid by one side and obligated to another entirely, the tribunal or court that will rely on the opinion. This piece unpacks what independence actually requires beyond "no coaching," how it gets tested in cross-examination and joint expert processes, and exactly where legitimate assistance to a legal team ends and advocacy quietly begins.
Category: Big-Picture Perspectives on Expert Witness Practice - Most legal teams treat the timing of expert engagement as a scheduling detail, something that "depends on the case." It isn't. This piece breaks down the three windows in which an expert can be brought onto a matter, pre-dispute, post-filing, and late-stage, what each one actually costs in practice, and why timing is one of the few levers a case team can control from day one.
India's arbitration regime was built on a promise: disputes resolved by a chosen tribunal, on a compressed timeline, largely outside the reach of an overburdened court system. How much of that promise survives depends on how much control courts retain once a dispute enters arbitration. Reducing that court intervention has become the organising idea behind nearly every recent reform to Indian arbitration law - from a string of Supreme Court judgments between 2023 and 2025, to the still-pending Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Bill, 2024, to the steady institutionalisation of Indian arbitration through centres such as the Mumbai Centre for International Arbitration (MCIA) and the arbitration centres in Hyderabad and New Delhi. The stakes are concrete. As of December 2025, more than 5.39 crore cases were pending across Indian courts, according to figures published on the National Judicial Data Grid. Pendency in district courts alone grew by nearly six per cent over three years. A commercial dispute that ends up back in court - through a Section 34 challenge to an award, a Section 9 application for interim relief, or a Section 11 fight over who gets to appoint the arbitrator - does not escape that backlog. It joins it. Every point in the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 at which a court can be approached is a point at which a dispute risks being pulled back into the queue that arbitration was meant to let parties bypass.
