---
title: Building the right team
description: Discover the importance of selecting the right expert for medical malpractice cases, emphasizing depth and relevance over prestige in expert testimony.
image: https://expertretainer.com/hubfs/oakland%20team.jpg
---

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# Building the right team

September 29, 2026 · By Jeff Willis, MD

![](https://expertretainer.com/hs-fs/hubfs/oakland%20team.jpg?width=1280&name=oakland%20team.jpg)

Every medical malpractice case needs a team of experts...

... NOT an all-star team.

Most of the cases we staff need at least three experts.  Sometimes five.

Standard of care.  Causation.  Damages.

Different questions... different specialties... VERY different people on the stand.

And the case is only as strong as the weakest one.

I think about Moneyball a lot when I'm doing this work.

(Stay with me here... I promise this goes somewhere.)

The 2002 Oakland A's couldn't afford stars.  So they stopped paying for what everyone else paid for... batting average... the pretty swing... the guy who looked like a ballplayer.

They paid for one thing.

Getting on base.

Nobody else priced it right... so it was cheap.

The expert market has the same problem.  It prices the wrong thing.

Here's what that looks like.

A 58-year-old walks into a community ED at 2 a.m. with dizziness and slurred speech.  Sent home with vertigo.  Back the next afternoon with a completed stroke.

The instinct?  Go get the biggest name you can find.  Department chair.  Comprehensive stroke center.  Two hundred publications.

For causation... maybe.  Would tPA inside the window have changed this outcome?  That's a question for a vascular neurologist who lives in the literature.  Depth wins.

For standard of care... the chair is the WRONG pick.

What does a reasonable emergency physician do at 2 a.m. in a twelve-bed department with no neurologist in the building?  The jury needs to hear that from someone who worked that shift last month... not someone who hasn't seen 2 a.m. without a resident in fifteen years.  Defense counsel knows this... and will make the ivory tower the whole cross.

For damages... the job changes again.  A physiatrist or life care planner who can walk a jury through the next thirty years of this patient's life without losing them.  Credentials matter less than whether twelve strangers believe them.

Three positions.  Three completely different profiles.

An all-star at every position is the wrong lineup.

The problem?

The list most attorneys shop from is built by the experts who WANTED to be on it.

Directories exist so experts can be found... and experts pay to be found.  So the visible market is heavy on the big CV... and the career witness with two hundred depositions.

The community emergency physician who worked that exact shift last month?  She's not on any list.  She has a practice.  She has partners who would notice.  She will NEVER put her name in a directory.

She's the one who gets you on base.

MY POINT?

The attorney isn't choosing the best expert for each job... they're choosing from the ones who signed up.

Honestly... this is my favorite part of the work.  Not finding the most impressive person.  Finding the right person for each job... including the ones who can't be found any other way... and making sure the three of them hold together.

A causation expert whose timeline doesn't match the standard of care expert's timeline is a gift to opposing counsel  .

(And yes... sometimes the right pick really is the big name.  It just shouldn't be the default.)

If you've got a case you're staffing right now, send me the summary.  I'll tell you which positions I think it needs and what kind of person fills each one.  No charge, no obligation.

[All Curbside Consult](https://expertretainer.com/curbside-consult/)

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