The professional reliability exception to the hearsay rule is being litigated at the trial of malpractice cases with increasing frequency after being the subject of decisions on the criminal side for many years. With the current tendency toward deriving best practices and related algorithms, one may anticipate that this aspect of expert medical testimony will continue to be important to the testimony of both plaintiff’s and defendant’s experts at trial.

In this two-part column, we will discuss the origin and development of New York law on this evidentiary point, observing at the outset that Rule 703 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure provides a similar but not identical approach. We will first discuss the historical development of this important exception to the general rule against hearsay; we will then address its application to malpractice defense.