Editor’s Note: The author of this post represented the Defendant in the appeal. This article does not address any case-specific facts and instead focuses on the holding’s impact on Maryland law generally. As with all of our posts, it contains only the author’s personal opinions, not those of his firm or his clients. This is the blog’s first substantive post on Rochkind, and we expect to have more. If you are interested in submitting a guest post, please contact the editor-in-chief.

By Derek Stikeleather

After more than a decade of incrementally adopting the Daubert standard—and the steady erosion of Frye-Reed as an independent, additional requirement for trial courts applying Maryland Rule 5-702—the Court of Appeals has clarified Maryland law on expert testimony. In Friday’s landmark Rochkind v. Stevenson opinion (its final of the Term), the Court formally adopted the Daubert standard as controlling Maryland law.[1] In doing so, it retired the superfluous Frye-Reed test, which had not only become riddled with exceptions but also evolved into the same “analytical gap” test that courts use when applying Rule 5-702 to expert testimony.