It is well settled that, to be admissible, expert opinion must be based upon facts. From where does the expert obtain those facts? New York law recognizes four sources: (1) facts personally known by the expert; (2) facts presented at trial and made known to the expert by means of a hypothetical question or the expert’s attendance at the trial; (3) facts not presented at trial but obtained by the expert from a witness subject to cross-examination; and (4) facts obtained by the expert from out-of-court sources, provided such sources are of the kind accepted in the expert’s profession as reliable in forming an opinion.1 The fourth source, properly called the “professional reliability” basis for expert opinion, was recognized by the Court of Appeals in People v. Sugden, 35 N.Y.2d 453 (1975), with the expressed goal of permitting an expert to base an opinion on evidentiary materials that were not admitted or even inadmissible at trial.2 Thus, an expert could rely on hearsay, unauthenticated documents or evidence barred by the character evidence rule, provided the facts so obtained were of a type reasonably relied upon by experts in the particular field.

Support for this basis was found in then proposed Federal Rule of Evidence 703 which contained such a basis. The drafters of FRE 703 justified it as nothing more than acceptance in the courtroom of what had long been the reality of what experts had been doing in their practice.3

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