When Should a Plaintiffs' Lawyer Name Experts in Personal Injury Cases?
When to Name Experts Choosing between being a plaintiffs’ lawyer or a defendants’ lawyer is bit like choosing whether to play offense or defense in football. Actually, it is really not like that at all. But one of the benefits of being a plaintiffs’ lawyer in medical malpractice and accident cases is that you can (1) largely dictate the pace and direction of the case, and (2) you can be fully prepared from the moment litigation commences.
Most lawyers completely squander this opportunity and they end up having to reload their gun in the middle of the gunfight when they could have put all of their bullets in the chamber from the beginning.
When we file a lawsuit in accident and malpractice cases, we serve the defendant with the Complaint, Interrogatories, Request for Admissions, Request for Production of Documents and Expert Designation at the same time we serve the Writ of Summons. It is one more hoop a lawyer has to jump through when commencing suit, but it helps you meet deadlines you will most certainly face down the road. The caveat to early designation of experts is to still put the deadline on your calendar and later check the designated experts to make sure you do not need additional experts for trial.
But to underscore the usefulness of naming experts from the beginning, do a Westlaw search for missed expert deadline cases. In only a few minutes, you will find hundreds of cases. I will bet you in 95% of these cases, the injury lawyer knew who his experts would be before filing suit but simply forgot to designate them before the deadline.
