Forensic psychiatry expert witness Dr. Roy Lubit is board certified in forensic psychiatry, child psychiatry and general psychiatry. He writes this on forensic evaluations:
Critiquing adverse forensic evaluations is a special art. It is inadequate to simply produce a competing evaluation, so that there is now one on each side. Key weaknesses in many reports include the expert simultaneously making speculative comments and ignoring important material that was available which contradicted their conclusions. I have even seen evaluators ignore the significance of data they reported in the body of their report. Other common problems include failing to access available information and simply accepting a litigants’ presentation of their histories as true.
Adverse expert reports can often be destroyed by carefully showing that the report’s conclusions are simply speculations supported by cherry picking of the data, and that a full consideration of the available information demonstrates that other hypotheses are more likely to be correct. This technique has even be successful when I was hired by one side to critique the report of a neutral evaluator.