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Where a jury returned a $2,925,000 verdict in a wrongful death suit against a defendant emergency room physician, the verdict should be upheld despite the fact that (1) the plaintiff's expert witness disclosure was not as clear or complete as it could have been, (2) the expert witness's trial testimony was inappropriately used by the plaintiff's counsel and (3) webpages used during the plaintiff's examination of the defendant did not qualify for admission under the learned treatise exception to the hearsay rule.
"The defendant argues that (Alexander) McMeeking's opinion that the defendant's five-minute examination of Jeffrey (Kace) was too brief and fell below the standard of care (exam duration opinion) was separate and distinct from McMeeking's disclosed opinions on the defendant's deviations from the applicable standard of care in the pretrial memorandum; that the plaintiff did not give any notice of this additional opinion before the trial began; and that the judge abused her discretion by permitting McMeeking to opine on the insufficiency of a five-minute medical evaluation.
"... Although McMeeking's exam duration opinion should have been more clearly disclosed as the grounds of his ultimate opinion regarding the defendant's deviation from the standard of care, the exam duration opinion -- as testified to by McMeeking himself --...