In a medical malpractice case in New York, medical experts routinely will not sit in the court room and listen to testimony of other witnesses.
How then can a medical expert know what has gone on during the trial?
Other than the trial attorney trying to summarize testimony that has already occurred, how can the medical expert truly give details of what each witness has said and what the claims and defenses are?
The best way to have that happen is to allow the medical expert to sit in the entire trial. However, the likelihood of that happening is zero. Most of these medical experts are practicing physicians and neither have the time or the desire to do that.
Instead, rather than relying on the attorney to provide snippets of information to the medical expert, the best way to give the expert specific details about what each witness has testified about is to provide them with actual trial transcripts known as “daily copy.”
This way, when the doctor gets on the witness stand we can now use those trial transcripts to form the basis for questions and testimony we will be asking.
We can also use those transcripts to formulate our hypothetical questions based upon what the defense is claiming and what their experts have said so far.
