Prior to a medical malpractice trial in New York, each side is required to exchange information about medical experts that they intend on producing at trial.
There are specific requirements about what must be exchanged in order to give each side notice of what type of witnesses will be coming into court to testify. When a medical expert is going to come into court, the law requires that the attorney notify their adversary that they have retained an expert and they must provide us with the experts' credentials and the dates that they obtained those qualifications.
Those credentials include when they graduated medical school, when they completed their residency and where, whether they completed a fellowship-which is postgraduate medical training and where they are licensed. They also must advise if the doctor is board-certified.
What happens if the attorney leaves out some critical information?
What happens is that at trial we can ask the judge to prevent the witness from getting on the witness stand and testify. We can argue that the defendants failed to give us the required information and as a result of that we are prejudiced because we did not have an opportunity to identify the witness, conduct research and prepare for cross examination.
