How to fact-check an opposing expert's CV in 10 minutes
Five free public sources, a defensible workflow, and what a tool can honestly automate (and what it can't).
A plaintiff attorney we work with got an expert report last quarter that listed "Board Certified in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, American Board of Internal Medicine." A 90-second ABMS lookup showed the certification had lapsed seven years earlier. The attorney opened the depo with that fact. The case settled inside of two weeks.
Not every CV lie is that clean, and not every lapse is dispositive — an expert can still be qualified with a lapsed certification depending on the jurisdiction and the specific issue. But every plaintiff attorney should run this check on every opposing expert before every deposition and before every Daubert motion. The cost is 10 minutes and a browser. The downside of skipping it is sitting across from a witness you haven't vetted.
Here is the workflow we run. Every source is free and public. At the end we'll show you what Deposition Prep Brief v2 pulls automatically so you can spend the 10 minutes on the parts a tool can't touch.
The 5-step process
2 minutes · Step 1: PubMed the expert by name
Open pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov and search the expert's exact name. Use the "Author" filter to narrow. Note:
Total publications indexed. If the CV claims 42 peer-reviewed papers and PubMed shows 7, you have a direct contradiction to raise in depo.
Most recent publication year. An expert testifying about current standard of care whose last indexed paper is from 2009 is a Daubert methodology target.
Co-authors and affiliations. Sometimes the expert's strongest papers are actually co-authored pieces where they were a fourth or fifth author — this matters when they claim "I published the seminal paper on X."
Journal quality. Publications in predatory open-access journals (Beall's list and its successors) don't carry peer-review weight. If half the CV is in journals that charge $800 to publish anything, note it.
Open certificationmatters.org (the ABMS public lookup) and enter the physician's name and state. The result tells you:
Which of the 24 ABMS member boards certify them
In which specialty and subspecialty
Whether the certification is current or expired
First certification year — compare to the CV
For osteopaths, repeat the lookup at the AOA Physician Certification site. For non-ABMS, non-AOA boards (the "American Board of Integrative Medicine," "American Board of Forensic Medicine," etc.), pause. Some of these are legitimate specialty societies. Others are self-styled boards that issue credentials for an application fee and a test. A quick Google of the board's name with "requirements" and "fee" usually tells you which one you're looking at.
Watch for: CVs that say "Board Certified" without naming the board. Always look for the specific board. "Board Certified" is a marketing phrase; ABMS certification in a named specialty is a legal fact.
2 minutes · Step 3: State medical board license check
Every state has a medical board license lookup. The Federation of State Medical Boards maintains a consolidated lookup at docinfo.org that searches across all state boards and shows disciplinary actions. Always check:
The state(s) the CV claims the expert is licensed in
Any state where the expert has ever practiced, even if not on the CV — experts sometimes omit a surrendered license
Current license status (active, inactive, lapsed, surrendered)
State boards vary in what they publish. Texas, California, New York, and Florida publish detailed disciplinary records. Some smaller states publish less. If you find a gap, pull the NPDB (National Practitioner Data Bank) if you have access, or request disclosure through discovery.
3 minutes · Step 4: Prior deposition history
This is the step a tool can't fully automate, and it's the one that pays off the most in depo. Sources:
Rule 26(a)(2)(B)(v) disclosure. In federal court, retained testifying experts must disclose a list of cases they've testified in as an expert (by deposition or at trial) during the previous 4 years. Demand it. If the defense disclosure is thin, push back.
Plaintiff-side listservs. AAJ's expert-witness list, state trial lawyer listservs, specialty-focused listservs (AAJ's Medical Negligence Section, Birth Trauma Litigation Group). Post the expert's name — someone has deposed them before.
Commercial databases. TrialSmith, IDEX Expert Witness Profiler, Westlaw's expert database. These aren't cheap, but for a repeat-customer defense expert, the depo transcripts they surface are gold.
PACER + state dockets. If you know a case number from Rule 26 disclosure, pull the docket to find the expert report and any Daubert briefing.
What you're looking for: prior opinions that contradict the current report, prior testimony where the expert admitted something they're now denying, prior Daubert exclusions, prior sanctions. Senior plaintiff attorneys keep personal files on repeat defense experts. The first time you depose someone is the expensive one; after that you build on your own notes.
Take the PubMed list from Step 1 and the publications section of the CV. Three red flags:
Claimed publications that PubMed doesn't index. Not every legitimate paper is in PubMed — book chapters, non-MEDLINE journals, and some regional titles are out. But if a listed "peer-reviewed original research" paper isn't findable anywhere (PubMed, Google Scholar, the journal's own archive), ask about it at depo.
Authorship claims that don't match. The CV may say "Smith J, Journal of Whatever, 2018, Pathophysiology of X" and the actual article lists Smith as the third of six authors. A fourth-author contribution to somebody else's paper is not "my publication on X" in the sense the CV implies.
Self-citations in lieu of peer-reviewed work. Expert reports that cite the expert's own conference abstracts, letters to the editor, and opinion pieces — instead of peer-reviewed original research — are Daubert-methodology targets.
The finding from Step 5 is usually not by itself dispositive. It's a depo line of questioning: "Doctor, your CV lists 42 peer-reviewed publications; PubMed indexes 7. Can you walk me through where the other 35 are?"
What a tool can honestly automate
Three of the five steps above are API-callable and can be done in under a minute by software. That's what Deposition Prep Brief v2 does:
Step 1 (PubMed): Hits NCBI E-utilities with the expert's name and affiliation, returns publication count, year range, top journals, most recent paper, and flags predatory-journal matches. Because we hit E-utilities directly (not a language model), citations are real.
Step 2 (ABMS): Structured lookup against ABMS Certification Matters. Returns certifying board(s), specialty, subspecialty, current status, first-certification year. Same for AOA.
Step 3 (state license): Queries the FSMB docinfo lookup across states the expert has claimed and states they've worked in. Returns license status and flags disciplinary actions.
Steps 4 and 5 (prior deposition history and publication authorship cross-check) still need human judgment. A tool can surface a Rule 26 disclosure list from an expert's prior case PACER dockets if you feed it the disclosure. It can flag CV-to-PubMed mismatches at a count level. But deciding whether a specific prior opinion contradicts the current one, or whether a fourth-author paper supports the expert's claim — that's attorney work.
Honest scope note: Depo Prep Brief v2 accelerates steps 1–3 from ~6 minutes of browser-tab-juggling to about 45 seconds of structured output. It does not replace steps 4–5. The full workflow is still a workflow — we just eliminate the mechanical parts.
When to do this
Every time, for every retained expert, before:
Their deposition
A Daubert or Rule 702 motion
A motion in limine that turns on the expert's qualifications
Trial (redo the check — certifications lapse, licenses get disciplined, publications appear between reports)
Ten minutes is not a big cost against a case where the expert's testimony is a key pillar. The cost of skipping it is walking into a deposition blind, or filing a Daubert brief without the material that would have won it.
The horror-story coda
The pulmonologist with the lapsed certification — the one from the top of this post — had been testifying for plaintiffs and defendants for about 15 years. His CV had said "Board Certified" (no specific board, no year) for the last four of those years. Nobody had run the check. The attorney who finally did got the case settled; the cases before that, where the expert had been cross-examined on standard-of-care opinions, had resolved at defense-favorable numbers.
That's the asymmetry. The check costs 10 minutes. The miss costs verdicts.
Want to see the automated version of steps 1–3?
Try Deposition Prep Brief v2 — paste the expert's name and affiliation, get PubMed / ABMS / state-license structured output in about 45 seconds. 14-day trial; no credit card.
Most legal AI is wrong 17–33% of the time. Watch MedLegal AI pin every finding to the exact record page — click any citation and it jumps to the line that proves it.