The opposing expert has already told you how they testify. They did it in other cases, under oath, in front of other lawyers, and most of the record sits in public dockets that nobody pulled.
Attorneys spend serious money deposing experts and almost nothing profiling them first. The standard prep is the report, the CV, and the Rule 26 disclosure. All three are authored by the person you are trying to test. Reading only those is like checking a witness by asking the witness for references.
The disclosure list is the expert’s own memory
Federal Rule 26(a)(2)(B) requires a retained expert’s report to list every case in the previous four years where the expert testified at trial or by deposition, and every publication from the previous ten. Lawyers read that as a complete record. It is a self-report.
Experts leave things off. Sometimes it is honest error, because a deposition from three years ago in a case that settled is easy to forget. Sometimes the omitted case is the one where a judge limited the testimony or struck it. The rule covers testimony, so cases where the expert consulted, drafted a report, and was never designated also never appear. Those are often the most interesting ones, because a consulting expert who gets dropped has usually said something the retaining side did not want in a report.
Say the disclosure lists six matters. An independent docket search for the expert’s name across PACER, CourtListener, and the state systems in the expert’s home county and two neighboring counties turns up nineteen. That gap proves nothing alone, but it hands you thirteen transcripts to request and tells you where to start.
Exclusion rulings are the most useful document you can find
Since the Florida Supreme Court adopted the Daubert standard in 2019, and since the December 2023 amendment to Federal Rule of Evidence 702 made the proponent’s burden explicit (more likely than not that the testimony meets the reliability requirements), challenges are a routine motion rather than a rare one. Every ruling on an earlier challenge is a free preview of your own.
Search the expert’s name against orders as well as dockets. Look for motions in limine, Daubert or Frye motions, and any order that mentions the expert by name in the findings. A court that has excluded the methodology has already written the paragraph you want to quote. If the same method comes back in your case with the same weakness, you are citing a result instead of arguing a theory.
Partial rulings matter as much as full exclusions. An order that let the expert testify on causation but barred a damages model tells you which half of the report the expert cannot defend.
Prior testimony contradicts the current opinion more often than you would expect
A professional expert who testifies for plaintiffs in one case and defendants in the next is not a problem on its face. Fields have two sides, and a good expert follows the facts. The problem is the expert who states a general principle as settled science for one client and calls the same principle contested for the next.
You find that by reading transcripts, and transcripts come from three places. Court files, when they were attached to a motion and not sealed. Transcript banks run by the plaintiff and defense bar associations, which usually require a membership or a request through counsel. And the lawyers who deposed the expert before you. A call to one of them costs a few minutes, and the answer is frequently a PDF.
Publications are the second source of contradiction. An article from 2016 that states the standard of care one way, while the report in front of you states it another way, is cross-examination you did not have to build. Pull the full text, not the abstract. Check the citations too, and open the sources the expert cites for the key sentences.
The credentials page has a verification step nobody runs
Degrees, licenses, board certifications, and society memberships all sit on the CV as assertions. Each one has a custodian that will confirm it. A university registrar or the National Student Clearinghouse confirms the degree. The state licensing board confirms the license and any discipline attached to it. The certifying board confirms whether the certification is current, lapsed, or was never held.
Look at dates. A “board certified” line with no year deserves a call. So does a “former member” line. And an expert whose licensed practice ended a decade ago, who now earns most income from testimony, is a different witness than the CV suggests, one whose opinions have not been tested against current clinical or field practice. Ask what share of the expert’s work is forensic. Their own deposition answers sometimes give you the number. Prior transcripts give it again, usually with a different percentage.
Money and relationships close the loop
Bias is a legitimate line of cross, and it is a documentary exercise, not a rhetorical one. Look for repeat retention by the same firm or the same insurer, which is visible when the expert’s name keeps appearing opposite the same defense counsel or in matters brought by the same plaintiff firm. Look for ownership interests in a company that sells the service the opinion supports. Look for the expert’s own litigation history, because a person who has been sued for professional negligence, or sanctioned, knows what the other side of this table feels like. State corporate filings on Sunbiz or the equivalent in the expert’s home state will show an LLC that bills the testimony, and its other officers.
None of this requires anything exotic. It requires someone to run the searches before the notice goes out, in a defined order, with the results written down so that a second person can reproduce them. The work product belongs in the file as a short chronology with a source cited for each line, which is the same standard we apply to reports written with the deposition in mind.
What to do with the result
The profile should change the deposition, not decorate it. Open with the questions where you already hold the transcript. Ask the expert to confirm the principle first, then show the prior testimony. Save the exclusion order for last, because by then the expert has committed to a methodology you already know a court rejected.
Keep one limit in mind. Everything above is public record or lawful records requests. Pretexting an expert’s former colleagues, or buying a transcript someone sealed, hands the other side a motion and takes your own credibility with it. We have declined to touch that kind of shortcut and will keep declining it. If a source is uncertain, the standard from the case filed two counties over applies: search the places the expert actually works, not the one place you expected them to be.
Plenty of experts will hold up fine. That is also a finding, and it is worth having before you spend the deposition budget. A clean profile tells you to narrow the cross and spend your hours elsewhere. Our litigation intelligence work for defense attorneys covers the same ground for fact witnesses, and the sourcing discipline is identical.
A check you can run this week
Take the last expert your side deposed. Without looking at the disclosure, search the expert’s name across PACER, CourtListener, and your county’s civil docket, then count the matters. If the count is higher than the number in the Rule 26 list, you have been taking depositions on a partial record, and the next one will be the same unless the search comes first.
If you need that search run properly, with a source cited for each line, Farsight Intelligence does it for attorneys and compliance teams across Florida and nationally. Florida Man Innovations, our business development practice, builds the revenue side for firms that sell this kind of work. Start at brettfl.com, book time at meet.brettfl.com, or write to [email protected].
Profile before you depose.