Resource
Medical chronology or expert review: which one a malpractice case needs
A chronology records what the documents say. An expert opinion judges what the care meant. Only the second can satisfy a merit requirement.
Two documents, two questions
A chronology answers what is in the record. Each entry states one fact and points to its page. Anyone can check it: open the page and see whether it says that.
An expert review answers what the care meant. Its correctness rests on whoever signed it: an opinion about the record, not a report of it.
What a merit requirement asks for
Many states require a certificate or affidavit of merit with, or shortly after, a malpractice complaint. What it is called, when it is due, who may sign it and what it must say vary by state.
What those statutes have in common: the document rests on a qualified expert’s opinion. The signature gives it effect. A chronology is not one, and adding conclusions to it produces an unsigned opinion.
Where the line falls, entry by entry
The shape of a chronology entry, illustrated rather than drawn from any case:
March 14, 09:12. Emergency department nursing note records a temperature of 39.1 C and a heart rate of 122. Cited to the page, one click away.
Whether those numbers should have triggered a different order is a question for a qualified expert. So is whether anything that followed caused harm.
Three sentences belong to the expert, never to the record vendor:
- Standard-of-care statements. That the care met, or fell below, what a reasonable practitioner would have done.
- Causation statements. That an act or an omission produced an outcome.
- Significance statements. That a finding was abnormal, alarming, or should have prompted something.
Why the order matters
The two are not alternatives, and the cheap one goes first. An unsorted production spends the most expensive hours on sorting.
Completeness belongs to the same stage. An opinion formed on an incomplete chart is revisited when the rest arrives.
A production testifies to its own completeness through its own stamp sequence and page-number footers. The defensible finding is always a floor: at least N pages did not arrive.
What Claracord delivers, and what it does not
A Claracord chronology is not an expert opinion, and it does not satisfy a certificate-of-merit or affidavit-of-merit requirement.
Claracord does not sell expert review. No part of the deliverable states an opinion about whether care was appropriate.
The record in order, every fact cited to its page. The set comes back deduplicated, indexed and Bates-stamped. The completeness report states missing pages as a lower bound. Human-verified.
Work product for the retaining professional: not legal or medical advice. Sold only to licensed legal and claims professionals.
The page for this practice area is malpractice counsel. What to demand from any chronology is on what a chronology is.