Tracy Liberatore is the founder of the National Expert Academy and a pioneer of the C.L.E.A.R. Method, an expert report-writing framework developed within a working medical-legal firm. A former physician assistant with ten years of clinical practice, she later earned her law degree with valedictorian honors and spent the next decade founding and operating Med Legal Pro, where she trained and placed clinical experts for attorneys handling medical malpractice, personal injury, and nursing home negligence cases nationwide.
She is the author of From Medicine to Law: Creating Winning Legal Teams with Medical Expertise and the host of the Statutes & Stethoscopes podcast. Her writing includes work on why accomplished clinicians may struggle in expert witness roles, the future of medical legal consulting, medical errors, and attorney concerns about medical records. Her work has been featured in USA Today, MSN, and CEO Feature.
Tracy now trains licensed clinicians to write expert reports attorneys trust, request, and refer. She shares insights through her personal LinkedIn, as well as the platforms for National Expert Academy and Med Legal Pro.
Scenario: A resident develops a stage 4 pressure ulcer after admission to a long-term care facility. Plaintiff counsel argues the facility failed to prevent it. Defense counsel argues the ulcer was clinically unavoidable. Both positions hinge on the same federal regulation. The question is what the regulation actually says, and how the medical record measures up to it.
To work through this one, it is time for a history lesson. Travel …
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Unavoidable pressure ulcer claims live and die by the record
If you think one word inside a medical expert report cannot break a case, look at what happened in Kline v. Zimmer. A defense expert testified about possible alternative causes of a plaintiff’s injury, not probable ones. That single word, possibly, is the reason opinions like his are routinely challenged. Across multiple jurisdictions, courts have held that an expert who testifies in possibilities is offering no evidence at all.
In civil …
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Medical expert witness report language gets cases struck
There is a conversation happening in the medical-legal space right now, and most clinicians doing expert witness work are not part of it. It is about artificial intelligence (AI). Specifically about whether AI belongs anywhere near an expert witness report. I want to weigh in. Not as a technology enthusiast and not as a skeptic. As someone who has spent a decade as a practicing physician assistant, earned a law …
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Expert witness credibility is destroyed by AI opinions
I want to tell you something attorneys already know but will never say to your face. When your expert report lands in their inbox and they read it, I mean really read it, they know within the first two paragraphs whether they are calling you again. Not after the case. Right then. And if the answer is no, they do not tell you. They do not give feedback. They do …
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Why clinicians fail at writing expert reports
