Expert testimony in an era of skepticism of expertise
June 03, 2025 - The public discourse in America surrounding the value of expertise — specialized knowledge in a particular subject matter gained over years of study and experience — has markedly shifted over the past several years. Where individuals once looked to so-called "traditional institutions" — academia, old-guard print media, books, or network TV — for news and information, many now look to social media or alternative news outlets that align with a certain viewpoint or ideology.
This shift in news/information consumption aligns with a growing skepticism toward expertise in everyday life, including skepticism of scientific, medical and legal experts. While American courtrooms have mechanisms that insulate them from the shift away from reliance on experts, the jury pool may still be affected by this change. Because expert testimony is a critical aspect of jury trials, we provide recommendations for tailoring expert testimony to accommodate jurors' changing preferences and to overcome the skepticism that they may bring to the courtroom.
The change in preferred news and information sources has resulted in a pronounced difference in the way that average Americans receive and digest information. Today, approximately one in five Americans say they regularly get news from news influencers on social media, according to the Pew Research Center.
Unlike traditional formats, information shared on social media sites is chopped into seconds-long snippets and presented by individuals of largely unknown or unverified qualifications, as reported by The New York Times, "For Gen Z, Tik Tok Is the New Search Engine." Sept. 16, 2022.
As a result, an individual with only anecdotal knowledge of a complex issue such as ADHD ("TikTok Misinformation is Warping Young People's Understanding of ADHD," ScienceAlert, sciencealert.com, March 21, 2025) may be presented opining on the condition alongside — and apparently co-equal to — a Ph.D. psychologist with decades of experience. This contrasts with the traditional-news format in which only vetted "experts" were given a platform to speak to the masses.
Commensurate with the evolution in the ways Americans consume news and media, there has been a recent systemic departure from reliance on expertise in everyday life. With access to unlimited information and online encouragement to "do your own research," Americans are placing less value in expertise, which manifests in multiple ways.
Americans are losing trust in science. A 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center showed that 57% of Americans say science has a mostly positive effect on society, compared with 73% in January 2019. This loss of public trust in science matters because "[p]eople with greater trust in scientists are more likely to align their own beliefs and actions with expert guidance and understanding," the report concluded.
Americans have also demonstrated a shift away from reliance on experts in the medical field, which was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Association of American Medical Colleges attributes the shift to several factors, including that people are overwhelmed by information, the country is increasingly socially divided and politically polarized and trust in traditional institutions is eroding.
Changes in the way average Americans consume information and the loss of trust in science means the jury pool is changing. Today's jurors, unlike those of 30 years ago, each have a powerful computer in their pockets that is connected via the internet to virtually all human knowledge (not to mention the budding field of AI).
These jurors are much more likely to view themselves as capable of researching complex questions to gain expertise on a given subject matter than their predecessors. Jurors are normally instructed not to use outside sources for information, and there have been instances where such use has led to mistrial.
Against this backdrop, what is a trial attorney to do? Experts are important in the courtroom. They are the only avenue by which a jury can be presented with opinions based on scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge. (See Federal Rules of Evidence 701 and 702.) It is also the experts' job to make complicated and often dry technical material both accessible and engaging to lay jurors.
And experts matter to cases and case outcomes. For example, in the extremely high-profile murder trial of Derek Chauvin in 2021, in the death of George Floyd, the medical experts are widely considered to have been key to guiding the jury's understanding of the case, particularly Dr. Martin Tobin, a pulmonologist and critical care specialist, as reported in The New York Times.
Dr. Tobin's testimony guided the jury through his analysis of hours of video footage of the arrest of Floyd, highlighting critical details in the videos. He also provided an anatomy lesson on the structure of the airway and operation of the lungs, with instructions for jurors to place their hands on their own necks to illustrate the areas he was describing.
Other high-profile cases in which expert testimony has played a critical role include the OJ Simpson murder trial (forensic scientists), and various opioid litigations (public health and pharmaceutical industry experts). Patent litigators need effective expert testimony in every single one of their cases.
How do trial lawyers meet this critical need for expert testimony given the current skepticism toward expertise? In some ways, the courtroom is uniquely insulated from the shift away from reliance on experts.Rule 701 of the Federal Rules of Evidence safeguards against parties offering unreliable opinions from lay witnesses. And Rule 702 requires courts to undertake rigorous analyses of the reliability and relevance of opinions offered by expert witnesses. See, "The New Daubert Standard: Implications of Amended FRE 702," JDSupra, May 17, 2024.
But the courtroom is not immune to changes in the way that society prefers to receive and digest information. Jurors today bring their habits for consuming information into the courtroom with them. They may also have shorter attention spans and strong convictions that complicated issues are simple and they can figure them out on their own. Trial attorneys must adjust to accommodate these changing preferences; they should adapt to use the changing jury pool to their advantage.
Do not rely on an expert's credentials alone. Academic degrees and experience are important in establishing an expert's credibility and the admissibility of their testimony, but attorneys cannot rely on an expert's qualifications alone to persuade jurors. Jurors are not going to believe an expert just because of their degrees or the number of papers they have published.
Similar to the social media news providers, the best experts have the ability to connect with both the material they are presenting and the audience, which comes across as more authentic. One benefit of not relying on credentials alone is that it opens the door to junior, more enthusiastic experts who may have previously been dismissed as lacking the gravitas assumed to come with age.
Create relatable expert narratives. No one likes listening to a seemingly endless march through boring, technical material, but certain areas of law (patent, products liability, etc.) can require the presentation of large amounts of technical data. Even worse than boredom, inauthenticity renders obvious "hired guns" especially risky in this environment of skepticism. In contrast, skilled experts can tell a story that not only makes the technical information understandable and relatable to the jury, but also gives them a reason to care about the outcome.
What can the expert provide that a juror could not get from his/her own internet research? The best expert testimony incorporates opportunities for the expert to interject personal experiences with the technology or field of expertise to make it more relatable, such as research that they care about personally or that solved a problem they faced in their own career.
Effective expert testimony will also incorporate engaging material such as testing that the jury can see with their own eyes or personalized tutorials on the technical issues at hand, like the one presented by the pulmonologist in the Chauvin trial. When jurors expect a feeling of proximity to the source of information, connection with jurors and authenticity are paramount.
Incorporate expert testimony into a cohesive, resonant story. Great trial lawyers know that even the most technically challenging cases require a resonant story that incorporates ethos (is your case morally right?), pathos (does your case connect on an emotional level?) and logos (does your case make sense?). Often these thematic points are conveyed through narratives that highlight sympathetic parties, such as a scrappy inventor who toiled to bring about her invention or an innocent party harmed by another's actions.
Strategic use of expert testimony can amplify these thematic points. For example, an expert with the right experience can not only explain the technical details of a case, but can also share first-hand knowledge, such as the challenges faced in the field, the historical context of the dispute, and the moral factors at play. By carefully connecting this information to overall themes of the case, the trial team can highlight the ethos, pathos, and logos of the story.
Implementing these recommendations requires investment both in the selection of experts at the beginning of a case and the detailed planning for expert testimony at trial. The benefit of that investment is a compelling trial story that meets jurors where they are and presents critical expert testimony in a way that can overcome any skepticism they may bring to the courtroom.
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The Guardian
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Bagwell has been waiting longer than the typical 90 days after signing her contract to receive the money. In a statement to the Guardian, the department stated its excitement about the project moving forward. 'New York City has taken bold steps in the effort to foster a collection of public artworks that better reflect who we are as a city, including this project – long called for by the local community – to commission a new monument for this site in East Harlem,' they note. 'This administration remains committed to fostering a diverse, vibrant public art collection that more fully represents the vast range of stories, experiences, and backgrounds that define New Yorkers. We're excited for the Victory project to move ahead.' On 23 June, the design commission voted unanimously to approve Bagwell's designs, and she can now begin work. Bagwell's situation reflects a broader failure to follow through on legislation and promises made following the 2020 racial justice protests, where Americans dismantled statues of Confederate soldiers that stood in their communities after the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. In 2021, Joe Biden passed legislation to replace the monument of Roger Taney, a pro-slavery chief justice who served on the court from 1836 until 1864, with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first African American supreme court justice, in the United States Capitol. The intended deadline for the building of the statute was December 2024, but that month, a source familiar with the matter said the joint committee on the library had only just signed off on a memorandum to begin the process. 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In 1876, Frederick Douglass called into question the making of the Emancipation Memorial, built by artist Thomas Bell in Washington DC. The creation of the statute was funded using donations from recently freed people. While the city created the monument to honor emancipation, it depicted a white man holding out his hand over a chained kneeling Black man, a design Douglass found problematic. 'What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the Negro, not couched on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man,' he said. DC officials removed the statute in 2021, and advocates are still discussing its replacement. Nearly 150 years after Douglass's speech, only 10% of the top 50 national monuments are of Black and Indigenous people, according to an audit completed by the Monument Lab, a non-profit public art and history studio. 'The story of this continent is not reflected in our monument landscape in full,' said Paul Farber, the director and co-founder of the Monument Lab. 'The monuments we have tell a partial story. Adding a monument or the selective removal of a monument can have a profound effect for a city or town. If we don't respond to the erasures, the lies by design we will be doomed to repeat. Our audit also showed that 99.4% of monuments were not taken down in 2021 or 2022.' The Trump administration's influence has now rolled back even that little bit of progress. This year, Pete Hegseth rolled back the names of two military forts to their namesakes of confederate soldiers. Following pressure from Republicans, Washington DC's mayor, Muriel Bowser, also ordered the destruction of the Black Lives Matter plaza in front of the White House. Trump has proposed reviving his controversial National Garden of American Heroes, using money cut from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which ended hundreds of grants for libraries, museums and archives. The garden would include George Washington and Christopher Columbus statues alongside Martin Luther King Jr, Kobe Bryant and Whitney Houston. 'When you look at some of the things that this particular administration is talking about, they're talking about going backward,' Bagwell says. 'That is still something to be concerned about.' Nationally, Republicans have been mixed on the issue of inclusion in public spaces. A Kentucky state senator, Chris McDaniel, is still advocating for the replacement of a Confederate statue. In 2020, he pre-filed a bill that would replace Jefferson Davis in the Capitol Rotunda with Carl Brashear, the first African American US navy master diver born in Tonieville, Kentucky. 'His story is inspirational,' he says. 'That's what monuments are supposed to be about. It's supposed to be able to point to people and say: 'This is somebody you can look up to.'' McDaniel's bill to replace Davis in the Capitol is at a standstill as the Kentucky Capitol Arts Advisory Committee and other legislators must weigh in on who they believe deserves to be honored. Mississippi's Republican governor, Tate Reeves, has shown mixed messages about Confederate symbols in his state. During the 2020 election, almost 73% of people in Mississippi voted to remove the Confederate flag with a new state's flag. 'This is not a political moment to me but a solemn occasion to lead our Mississippi family to come together, to be reconciled and to move on,' Reeves said after the vote and before it was eventually replaced. In the same year, Reeves simultaneously opposed the removal of Confederate monuments. 'I reject the mobs tearing down statues of our history, north and south, Union and Confederate, founding fathers and veterans,' he says. 'I reject the chaos and lawlessness, and I am proud it has not happened in our state.' Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative who led the building of Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama, a civil rights museum that works to reshape the racist narratives about African Americans in Alabama, explains Reeves's messaging. 'I think it's a struggle, a competing narrative, and sometimes they give away a little something by holding on to something that makes what they're giving away feel acceptable,' he tells the Guardian. Stevenson says it 'is about power, because most of the people who are kind of in control of these things [are] aligned, in my view, with this problematic history. We can't accept just what [they're] gonna give' us. Some artists who have worked to replace Confederate monuments with ones that honor Black history have succeeded and received praise despite government resistance. In Roanoke, Virginia, the city sculptor commissioned Lawrence Bechtel to replace a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee with one of Henrietta Lacks. Lacks' cells, now called HeLa, were taken without her knowledge in 1951 and have now become vital to medical research; they have been used to develop polio and Covid-19 vaccines. It took about four years for the city to raise the money for the statue and a year from the contract being signed for Bechtel to build the monument. 'I had bought a veil to cover it over, and everyone was invited to come close as the veil was pulled off, and people just mobbed it. It was fantastic,' he says. 'It was just wonderful. It was very uplifting.' Bechtel said he has yet to receive a negative email. Watson, who built a monument of John Lewis to replace a memorial put in place by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, recalls the community's excitement about the monument before he even finished. 'The idea of putting up John Lewis in its place was quite exciting for the community, and since it has been up, I have had nothing but positive responses,' he says. Watson remains steadfast in his belief that the inclusivity of public art is crucial. 'I think we artists need to represent our community; we need to have our values represented in our environment,' he says. 'I think it's important that we do have art in our community that represents the truth, represents our values, represents our history, and points our way forward.' Stevenson, a civil rights lawyer, believes that reclaiming the narrative in public spaces can challenge the racist narratives embedded into some Americans' mindset. When he first started working in public art, there were 59 markers and monuments honoring the Confederacy in his state yet none paid tribute to Alabama's history of being the state with one of the largest slave populations, so he and his team worked to create plaques in public spaces that honored those who were enslaved. He refers to the process of reframing public conversation as narrative work, responding to the racist views long perpetuated by institutions. With the building and taking down of monuments, he suggests that we need a new framework to tell the full story of American history as a nation. 'I think we have to find a better way to help people in this country recognize that there's a place for people of African descent in this country and that our stories can't be denied any longer,' Stevenson says. Bagwell also emphasizes the importance of honoring African Americans' vital contributions to American society through public art. 'It's just stunning that we have made so much out of so little,' she says. 'The contributions we've made to this country are phenomenal, and they should be remembered because we are very much a part of what made America great in the first place.'
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