About this report. This inaugural edition establishes a baseline for how expert testimony is priced, challenged, and admitted in U.S. courts. It synthesizes the most consequential federal rule change in a generation, published Daubert outcome research, 2024 market fee surveys, and the public court record — over 10 million opinions and tens of millions of PACER docket entries now accessible through the Free Law Project's CourtListener. Future editions will incorporate SwornIn's proprietary Expert Reliability Index (ERI) and on-platform engagement data to track these trends in real time.
Executive Summary
The New Bar: Amended Rule 702
On December 1, 2023, Federal Rule of Evidence 702 — the standard governing expert testimony — received its most significant amendment in almost a quarter century. The change targeted two recurring problems in how courts had been applying the rule.
What changed
- Preponderance standard. Proponents must now prove admissibility by a preponderance of the evidence. For years, many courts — citing a "liberal standard of admissibility" — treated questions about an expert's basis or methodology as going to the weight of the testimony rather than its admissibility. The amendment makes clear that admissibility is the court's threshold question.
- Reliable application. The amended rule requires a tighter connection between the expert's opinion and the methods used: the opinion must reflect a reliable application of the principles and methods to the facts of the case.
Why it matters
Courts now have explicit clarity that Rule 702 requires a searching analysis and real gatekeeping before expert testimony reaches a jury. While commentators continue to debate how much the rule's substance changed, the practical effect is unmistakable: judges are scrutinizing the reliability of expert methodology more actively, and the attorney refrain that reliability "goes to weight" no longer holds. In an environment where roughly a third of challenged experts are already excluded, a higher, more explicit gatekeeping standard raises the stakes of choosing the right expert.
Daubert by the Numbers
PwC's long-running study of Daubert challenges to financial experts has evaluated more than 1,500 published opinions since 2000. The headline findings, paired with discipline-level detail, show how real the admissibility risk is — and how unevenly it falls.
Reliability is the leading cause of exclusion, followed by relevance and qualifications. Methodological flaws — the misuse of otherwise accepted financial and economic methods — are a frequent driver. The throughline is that exclusion is rarely about credentials alone; it is about whether the method was applied reliably to the facts — precisely the connection amended Rule 702 now foregrounds.
The Price of Expertise
Expert-witness fees set a record in 2024, with the average hourly rate reaching roughly $451. Rates rise from case review to deposition to trial testimony, and vary widely by specialty and market. Experts in large metropolitan areas typically command 10–25% more than those in smaller markets.
The economic implication is straightforward: experts are a material, rising line item in litigation budgets, and an excluded expert is not just a lost opinion but lost fees, lost time, and often a weakened case. The cost of choosing wrong is climbing alongside the fees themselves.
The Data Landscape
What makes 2026 different from every prior year is that the raw material for evaluating experts and judges is finally open and machine-readable. The Free Law Project's CourtListener provides free API access to more than 10 million judicial opinions and tens of millions of PACER docket entries in the RECAP Archive, spanning 3,358 jurisdictions. For the first time, an expert's appearances, a judge's Daubert rulings, and the patterns across both can be queried programmatically rather than reconstructed by hand from memory and relationships.
The expert-witness consulting and brokerage market itself is estimated at roughly $789.5 million in the U.S. in 2025 across about 11,925 firms, growing near 6.6% annually — a fragmented, relationship-driven market that has historically lacked structured data, transparent scoring, or analytics. The infrastructure to change that now exists.
What It Means
For litigators
- Vet methodology, not just credentials. Under amended Rule 702, a distinguished CV will not save an opinion whose method is unreliably applied.
- Know the judge. Admissibility outcomes vary by jurisdiction and by individual judge; a judge's prior Daubert rulings are now discoverable from the public record. Try SwornIn's free judge lookup →
- Pressure-test your own expert before the other side does — and assess the opposing expert's exclusion history early.
For experts
- Document your methodology and its reliable application; this is increasingly where cases are won or lost on admissibility.
- A clean, transparent track record is becoming a competitive asset as that record becomes computable and comparable.
The SwornIn View
SwornIn was built for this moment. As Rule 702 raises the gatekeeping bar and the public record becomes computable, SwornIn structures expert credentials, scores every expert with a transparent Expert Reliability Index, flags Daubert risk, and surfaces judicial admissibility tendencies — so firms can choose experts who will survive a reliability challenge, and experts can demonstrate that they will. Subsequent editions of this report will draw on SwornIn's growing engagement and ERI dataset to track these dynamics in real time.
Methodology & Sources
This inaugural edition synthesizes public, secondary research and primary court data. Daubert outcome figures derive from PwC's annual Daubert Challenges to Financial Experts study. Fee figures reflect 2024 expert-fee surveys (ExpertPages / SEAK). Rule 702 analysis reflects the amendment effective December 1, 2023, and contemporaneous legal commentary. Market sizing is from IBISWorld (2025). Court-record scale is reported by the Free Law Project (CourtListener). Figures are approximate and rounded; this report is informational and is not legal advice.
Primary sources: PwC Daubert Challenges Study · ExpertPages 2024 Expert Witness Fee Survey · SEAK 2024 Survey of Expert Witness Fees · Amended Federal Rule of Evidence 702 (eff. Dec 1, 2023) and commentary (Arnold & Porter, McGuireWoods, Sidley Austin) · IBISWorld Expert Witness Consulting Services (2025) · Free Law Project / CourtListener coverage statistics.
© 2026 SwornIn LLC · swornin.io · The State of Expert Witness Testimony, 2026 Edition