TESTIMONY INTELLIGENCE

What has this expert actually done on the stand?

Every time an expert witness is challenged, a court leaves a record — admitted, limited, excluded, or something subtler. That record is public, but it is scattered across thousands of opinions and dockets, and no one has read it cleanly. SWORN does.

This page walks you through a single expert so you can see what that means in practice — and, honestly, so you can tell us where we get it wrong.

The problem we’re solving

If you’ve ever tried to vet an opposing expert, you know the drill: a paralegal digs through Westlaw, you get a pile of cases, and you still can’t answer the question that matters — has a court ever thrown this person out, and on what basis? The existing expert databases mostly count mentions. They routinely log a case as an “exclusion” when the expert was never excluded at all.

The distinction between “the judge kept this testimony out” and “the testimony came in but the case failed anyway” is everything — and it’s the thing everyone gets wrong.

Meet the expert

Dr. Arthur L. Frank — pulmonary and occupational medicine, a frequently plaintiff-retained causation expert in asbestos and talc cases. Below are four real court events involving his testimony. Read the judge’s own words in each; that’s the point — you never have to take our word for it.

Three admissibility rulings

1 admitted Rule 702
Russell v. Illinois Central Railroad Co.
Tennessee Court of Appeals · 2015
“The trial court did not apply an incorrect legal standard in determining that Dr. Frank’s opinion was reliable under Rules 702 and 703 and in permitting the jury to hear it. The weight to be given his testimony was a matter properly assigned to the jury.”
What to notice His methodology was challenged and held reliable — the testimony came in. Notice SWORN tags this Rule 702, not Daubert: the court applied Tennessee’s McDaniel factors and never invoked Daubert. That distinction matters to how you’d cite it.
2 admitted Daubert
Glenn v. 3M Company
South Carolina Court of Appeals · 2023
“Further, the cumulative dose theory on which Rita’s experts relied easily meets the legal standard for reliability.”
What to notice A different state, the same cumulative-dose theory, the same result: admitted.
3 excluded Daubert
Andrews v. Norfolk Southern Railway Co.
Tennessee Court of Appeals · 2019
“Dr. Arthur Frank will not be allowed to testify at the trial of this case on the issue of specific medical causation and will not be allowed to testify that exposure of Raymond Andrews to asbestos caused or contributed to cause Mr. Andrews’ lung cancer.”
What to notice Same expert, same ‘any exposure’ methodology — but here the court excluded his specific-causation opinion. This is the value: one expert’s methodology can be reliable in one courtroom and excluded in the next, and SWORN shows you exactly where the line fell and why.
Same expert. Same cumulative-exposure methodology. Held reliable in Tennessee and South Carolina — excluded on specific causation in another Tennessee case. That split, and the reason for it, is what SWORN surfaces.

The one that isn’t what it looks like

Now the case that shows why this is hard — and why doing it right is worth something.

4 not an exclusion no admissibility challenge
Moeller v. Garlock Sealing Technologies, LLC
U.S. Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit · 2011
“Dr. Frank testified only that all types of asbestos can cause mesothelioma and that any asbestos exposure counts as a ‘contributing factor.’”
What to notice You likely know this case. The Sixth Circuit reversed the verdict because the causation proof was legally insufficient — NOT because Dr. Frank’s testimony was ruled inadmissible. His testimony was admitted; the claim failed anyway. Almost every expert-tracking product would file Moeller under ‘Frank excluded’ or ‘Frank lost.’ It is neither, and treating it as an exclusion would badly mislead you. Separating these two things — kept out vs. came in but not enough — is the single hardest thing to get right, and it is the thing SWORN is built around.

Where this is headed

Read across enough experts and you get something no one currently has: for any testifying expert, the shape of their courtroom record — where their methods hold up, where they’ve been excluded, and where a case failed for reasons that have nothing to do with their credibility. Built carefully enough that you could actually rely on it.

We’re not there yet, and we won’t pretend to be. Right now this is a research preview: the readings you see are produced by a rigorously-tested process, but they haven’t been measured against a lawyer’s judgment. That’s where you come in.

We’ve pulled 30 real rulings and want to know, case by case, whether we read them the way a litigator would. It takes about 20 minutes, everything saves as you click, and your answers become the benchmark we hold every future version to.
Help us calibrate — start the review
Every quotation above was verified verbatim against the source opinion before it was shown. All cases are public court records. This is a research preview and not a validated statistic; nothing here is a win/loss record.

SWORN · Testimony Intelligence · a TestiphAI project