Expert witness demand does not grow evenly. It follows pressure points in litigation: new care models, unresolved technology disputes, expanding regulatory scrutiny, and large-scale dockets that absorb entire pools of specialists.
That pattern is especially clear in 2026. In an interview on where demand is moving, Stephanie Santiago, Senior Director of Expert Search at Expert Institute, pointed to a mix of emerging and cyclical forces. Some are tied to genuinely new forms of litigation. Others come from mass torts and large consolidated matters that can reshape expert availability across the market.
Acute-care telemedicine is becoming a real litigation category
Santiago’s clearest call on emerging demand was not generic telehealth. It was the use of remote physicians in hospital-based acute care.
“Telemedicine is not new,” she said. “The application of telemedicine into acute care is very new.”
That distinction matters. Traditional telemedicine disputes often involved primary care or behavioral health. What Santiago is seeing now is different: remote hospitalists directing care during high-acuity moments without being physically present at bedside.
In practical terms, that creates demand for experts who can address:
- Hospital medicine standards of care
- Emergency response workflow
- Nursing communication and escalation
- Causation in delayed intervention cases
- Hospital administration and staffing practices
Santiago described cases where “a hospital floor in a hospital [is] being staffed with a remote doctor,” including situations where “the doctor isn’t physically in the room,” and nurses are relaying information during a code and administering the care. For plaintiffs’ counsel, that raises familiar malpractice questions in a new operational setting: whether remote coverage delayed decision-making, changed the standard of care, or reflected cost-driven staffing choices rather than sound clinical judgment.
Her view is that this demand is likely to continue, not because telemedicine itself is new, but because hospitals are applying it in places where the litigation risk is still being defined.
AI disputes are moving from theory to ownership fights
AI remains the most obvious long-term growth area, but Santiago’s framing is narrower and more useful than broad predictions about “AI litigation.” The cases she sees center on ownership, access, and training data.
“A lot of it has to do with how the models are being trained,” she said.
That means growing demand for experts who can explain:
- How large language models are trained
- What data sources were used
- Whether outputs can be traced to protected works
- How market access or competitive restrictions may be framed in technical terms
- What constitutes reasonable development practices in AI systems
Santiago pointed to copyright disputes over training data as a major area to watch. “Who owns what gets put in the model, who owns the byproduct, what’s fair,” she said, is where much of the conflict sits today.
Her forecast is measured. AI litigation could accelerate sharply, but much depends on early court rulings. “If the court rules on the side of the authors, you’ll see a huge uptake,” she said. If not, the economics of those cases may look very different. For attorneys, that is a useful reminder: emerging expert demand is often shaped by whether early cases create a viable path to recovery.
Financial experts are seeing broader use
Santiago also noted an uptick in financial matters. While she was careful not to overstate the cause, she pointed to a broader increase in visibility into conduct that once remained harder to scrutinize.
“I think there’s just more visibility on some of the things that the industry was previously able to keep tight-lipped,” she said.
That environment tends to increase demand for:
- Forensic accountants
- Damages experts
- Valuation professionals
- Corporate finance and governance specialists
- Industry-specific compliance experts
For complex litigation, financial testimony is often not limited to pure damages. It also helps frame internal controls, reporting practices, transaction reasonableness, and patterns of concealment or misrepresentation.
Mass torts still distort the market
Not every demand spike reflects a new industry trend. Some reflect scale.
Santiago emphasized that large mass torts can consume expert capacity across specialties for years. “When there’s a large mass tort,” she said, entire categories of experts can become difficult to source for unrelated matters. She cited examples from her experience, including pesticide litigation, defective medical implants, and product liability claims.
Her example was blunt: “When we have a need for a hundred ENT specialists, it can be hard for us to find one to work on a medical malpractice case because everybody’s busy.”
That is an important market reality for 2026. Demand is not just about which specialties are growing. It is also about which large dockets are tightening supply.
The larger pattern
One of Santiago’s most useful observations is that early litigation outcomes often shape the expert market that follows. “Those defining cases that happen early in these emerging markets almost define expert witness demand down the road,” she said.
That is the right way to read 2026. Watch for demand where the underlying business model is new, where liability theories are still being tested, and where early rulings may determine whether cases scale. Right now, acute-care telemedicine and AI fit that description most clearly. Financial disputes and mass tort-driven shortages remain close behind.
For litigators, the takeaway is straightforward: the next wave of expert demand will not be driven by novelty alone. It will be driven by whether courts, counsel, and claim economics turn emerging risk into durable litigation.
