---
title: Where the money goes
description: Explore the various options for sourcing medical experts in malpractice cases and understand how payment structures impact your choices and costs.
image: https://expertretainer.com/hubfs/cutofmoney.jpg
---

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# Where the money goes

November 3, 2026 · By Jeff Willis, MD

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

So you've got a medical malpractice case and you need an expert.

What are your options and how much is it going to cost you?

Call a colleague?  Search a directory?  Hire a firm to go find someone?

Finding an expert is work... somebody has to figure out what the case needs, find a physician who fits, and talk a busy doctor into reading a stack of records for someone they've never met.

Somebody gets paid for that.  Fair enough.

What changes from one option to the next is who pays, who collects, and when.

What a lot of folks might not appreciate... the way the money moves decides which doctors you ever get to see.

Word of mouth costs nothing.  You call a colleague and get a name.  You're limited to the doctors your colleagues happen to know, but nobody is taking a cut.

With directories, the expert pays an annual fee to be listed, and pays extra to sit near the top of the page or show up in more states.  Searching is free for you, you call the doctor directly, and nothing gets added to the hourly rate.

For the attorney, that seems like a pretty good deal.

But the only doctors in directories are the ones willing to pay to be found.  And the names at the top of the list are usually the ones who PAID for the top.

Markup brokers are the opposite.  You pay extra... you just don't see it as its own line.  The broker's cut is built into the expert's hourly rate, so it's on every hour you get billed for the life of the case.

In fairness, somebody is handling the scheduling and chasing the invoices... so there is work being done.

But think about which doctors sign up for that.  They have to be OK with someone else billing for them, OK with waiting until the broker gets paid before they get paid, and in some of the contracts I've read, OK with agreeing not to call you directly.

And how big is the broker's cut? I wish I could tell you... but it's almost never published.

Flat-fee search firms charge you once per search and leave the expert's rate alone.  They can also recruit doctors who aren't listed anywhere and aren't willing to let brokers mark up their fees.

Read the contract, though.  It's common for both sides to agree not to work together directly for a few years without going back through the firm.  So the second case with the same expert can cost you another fee.  How does that make any sense?  I get it... but I also don't get it.

And then there's doing it yourself, where the money goes to your paralegal's and your associate's time.  Nobody ever totals those hours, so it feels free... but it's not.

OK, Jeff... what's your point?

Every one of these models narrows the field before you see a single name.  Each one can only show you the doctors who agreed to the way it gets paid.

The doctors who don't want others taking their money?

You never hear about them.

There is no perfect model for attorneys to source experts.  They all add cost to your case in one way or another.  What's important is that you get the best expert for the case.

So... back to the question.  What are your options and how much is it going to cost you?

In reality, any of these models can get you an expert.

Just know where the money's going.

Because that's also where your expert came from.

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