Florida’s first appellate review under Daubert occurred in Perez v. Bell South Telecommunications, Inc., 39 Fla. L. Weekly D 685b (April 24, 2014). The Third District Court of Appeals became the first Florida appellate court to apply the Daubert standard to uphold a decision by a trial court, excluding an expert from testifying at trial. The trial court had reviewed the expert’s opinion under the Frye standard that was applicable at the time it was deciding the issue. However, the appellate court correctly stated in its opinion that the law governing the admissibility of an expert’s opinion in Florida was the Daubert standard, not the Frye standard since the legislature recently changed the law. As a result, the Third District Court of Appeals decided in Perez to apply the Daubert standard in lieu of the Frye standard, retroactively. Nonetheless, the appellate court affirmed the trial court’s exclusion of the plaintiff’s expert.
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