What an expert witness costs on the West Coast

The staging matters more than it appears to, because it is what allows a matter to stop. Counsel who commissions a report at the outset has committed to the full cost of that report before knowing whether the records support it. Counsel who commissions a review and a verbal assessment first has bought the ability to stop after the cheapest stage.

Preliminary screening — the initial conflict check and conversation about what the matter needs — is complimentary here and should be complimentary anywhere. Paying for a conversation about whether you need an expert is a poor sign about the rest of the engagement.

A written fee schedule issues before any work begins. Anyone who wants specific figures for a specific discipline should ask for that schedule rather than rely on a published range, because the range that fits a records review does not fit trial testimony.

This surprises people, and it explains why a case with a modest record and a contested opinion can cost less than a case with an uncontested opinion and forty thousand pages. Volume of material drives the review stage almost linearly, and a poorly organised production drives it further.

There is a straightforward saving available here that counsel controls entirely: producing records to an expert in an organised, deduplicated, chronological form rather than as a raw production. The expert will otherwise do that work, at expert rates, and it is not expert work.

The deposition stage is less controllable, but it is proportionate to how well the report was drafted. A report that states its bases, its method and its limits on its face gives less to explore than one that leaves them to be extracted.

The mechanics differ enough between the three states that assuming one applies elsewhere is unwise, and the details in any matter are for counsel to confirm against the governing rule and order. This site does not calculate any figure or deadline.

The practical point for budgeting is that an expert's deposition is a cost that lands on the opposing party rather than on the retaining one — which is worth knowing when assessing what a matter will actually cost you as against what it will cost in total.

The alternative sequence is straightforward. Identify the one proposition the case depends on, engage the discipline that establishes it, obtain a verbal assessment, and only then decide whether the supporting opinions are worth commissioning. If the central opinion does not hold, the supporting ones were never going to save it.

This matters more in some jurisdictions than others. Where the recoverable noneconomic component of a claim is subject to a statutory ceiling — as in California medical negligence matters under the MICRA schedule — the proportionality question arrives earlier and harder than it does in a matter with no such limit.