Mastering the Medical Expert Witness
Date and Venue
Saturday, October 10, 2026
10am-4pm Eastern Time
Live Virtual
Registration
Agenda
ACLM 2026 Expert Witness Agenda
The expert witness occupies a position that is both unique and demanding: the medical professional is asked to translate the genuine uncertainties of clinical medicine into testimony that can withstand the adversarial rigor of cross-examination. The role rewards neither clinical mastery nor legal fluency alone, but the rarer discipline of holding both at once — articulating a defensible scientific opinion while navigating the rules of evidence, the strategies of opposing counsel, and the ethical duties owed simultaneously to one’s profession and to the court.
This one-day conference is built for that discipline. Tracing the full arc of an engagement — from the first call of retention through the verdict — it moves deliberately through the moments where credibility is made or lost: the duties and conflicts that attach the instant an expert is retained; the evidentiary gatekeeping of Daubert, Frye, and the newly amended Rule 702; the written report that frames causation to a reasonable degree of certainty; and the deposition and cross-examination where a reputation is tested in real time. Faculty drawn from both medicine and law pair clinical judgment with courtroom strategy, offering not abstract principle but the practical, hard-won craft of the effective expert.
Whether you are weighing your first engagement or have testified for decades, the program is designed to sharpen the judgment that separates a merely qualified witness from a genuinely persuasive one
2026 Midyear Conference Committee
Chair: Richard Kelly, MD, JD, MPH, FASA, FCLM