When working with a wrongful death attorney, it’s common that they may do work surrounding obtaining expert witnesses. This may leave you quite confused at first take; why would they need another expert if your injury lawyer is a legal expert in and of themselves? While the term expert witness may be vague, these folks play a critical role in securing your case, and they’re used widely in the legal field in a variety of contexts and categories.
Learn more about wrongful death expert witnesses and how they can help win you a settlement from JD Haas, your Minneapolis team of wrongful death attorneys.
Who Are Expert Witnesses?
Contrary to the phrase’s face value, these witnesses do not need to be present at the scene of the wrongful death—but they do need to be experts in their given field. An expert witness is, in essence, an individual with unique skills and expertise that can provide context to an occurrence that other people outside of the field cannot.
Lawyers lean on them because they offer new perspectives that only their experience can lend, and these perspectives can help win a case. For example, a car crash injury lawyer may contact an accident reconstruction expert to help prove liability in a given situation, as all that person’s years of study and fieldwork are valuable in the eyes of the law.
Why Use Expert Witnesses?
As we stated above, their experience is valuable; you’d trust a doctor when learning about what caused an injury more so than, say, a layperson, for example. However, expert witnesses can sometimes do something that standard witnesses cannot: they can give what are called opinion testimonies.
Without getting too far in the weeds, that means that they’re allowed to provide fact-based context to a given case, while regular witnesses must stick to clarifying, perception-related information. Expert witnesses are useful because they can help to deduce what happened in a case, even if no unbiased passerby is there to take the event in. The court accepts their opinion because it is based on expertise.
What’s Required to Become an Expert Witness?
People of any profession can become an expert witness, according to the Expert Institute—though medical and science-based expertise is the most sought-after. Generally speaking, expert witnesses demonstrate credibility by having high levels of knowledge in their field, usually but not always obtained via formal education. Their reputation is also examined in other ways; have they won awards in their field or spoken at large events?
JD Haas: Wrongful Death Lawyers Here for you From Start to Finish
We’re a team of wrongful death lawyers that’s ready to hear your story. Give our Minneapolis office a call today at 952-345-1025. In addition to Minneapolis, we also serve Bloomington, Rochester, and Saint Paul.