About Dr. Alvaro Alban, MD, MBA

Dr. Alban began his career in indigent criminal defense with the Brooklyn Legal Aid Society, working on matters where the physical evidence and the charging theory did not always agree. That work set the pattern for everything since: reading a record closely enough to see what it actually establishes, and saying so plainly whether or not it helps the side that asked.

His practice broadened from criminal defense into civil litigation and into professional licensing matters before administrative tribunals. Over more than twenty years he has supported over 150 matters — the review, the written opinion, the deposition, and where the case goes that far, the testimony.

He is board certified in emergency medicine. Emergency medicine is an unusually broad vantage point for litigation work, because the specialty is undifferentiated by design: an emergency physician evaluates trauma, overdose, cardiac and neurologic emergencies, obstetric complications, and psychiatric crisis in the same shift, under time pressure, with incomplete information. That is also how injuries arrive in a litigation record — partial, urgent, and documented by clinicians who were not thinking about a future lawsuit.

Alongside his medical training, Dr. Alban holds an MBA and has formal training in finance. The combination is uncommon and it is the reason Themis works across both medical and financial subject matter rather than only one.

It matters most where the two overlap, which is more often than attorneys expect. A catastrophic injury case is a medical causation question and a lost earning capacity question at once. A healthcare billing fraud prosecution turns on whether services were rendered and clinically indicated, and on how the claims were coded and paid. A life care plan is a clinical document with a financial model attached. Matters like these are frequently briefed by two experts who never speak to one another, and the inconsistencies that produces are among the easiest things for opposing counsel to exploit on cross.

Themis Expert Witness, LLC is a managed expert network rather than a solo practice, and it is worth being precise about what that means.

Dr. Alban personally handles emergency medicine and medical causation work — the record review, the report, and the testimony are his. For the other disciplines the firm covers, he identifies, vets, and manages an independently credentialed expert in that field, then stays involved through report review and trial preparation. The forensic pathologist is a forensic pathologist. The structural engineer is a structural engineer. No one testifies outside their own qualifications, which is the fastest way an expert opinion gets excluded.

What the network model buys retaining counsel is a single point of contact who has already done the vetting, and who can tell you during the screening call whether the matter needs one expert, two, or none. The engagement process sets out what happens from first contact through trial.

The engagement history runs to plaintiff and defense counsel in civil matters, and to both prosecution and defense in criminal ones. That balance is deliberate and it is also a practical advantage: an expert whose entire history sits on one side of the docket invites a bias cross-examination that has nothing to do with the merits of the opinion, and experienced opposing counsel will spend a meaningful portion of a deposition on exactly that.

The corollary is that a preliminary screening sometimes ends with the conclusion that the record will not support the opinion counsel was hoping for. That answer is delivered during the initial call, at no cost, rather than after a retainer has been spent and a deposition has gone badly.

Expert admissibility is not one standard across these three states. California trial courts apply the gatekeeping analysis from Sargon Enterprises v. USC under Evidence Code sections 801 and 802. Washington retains the Frye general-acceptance test for novel scientific evidence alongside ER 702. Oregon applies its own framework from State v. Brown and State v. O’Key. Federal matters throughout the Ninth Circuit apply Federal Rule of Evidence 702 as amended in December 2023, and the Daubert line of authority.

These are genuinely different tests, and an opinion drafted without regard to which one governs is an opinion drafted for the wrong forum. Reports are prepared with the applicable standard in view. Jurisdiction-specific practice notes are set out on the California, Washington, and Oregon pages.