Table 1.
Types of expert opinions.
| Criteria | Types of Opinions | |
|---|---|---|
| Commissioning entity | Court | Prepared by registered experts |
| Prepared by experts appointed ad hoc or ad casum | ||
| Commissioned ex officio/motu proprio | ||
| Commissioned at the request of the party to the proceedings | ||
| Official (ordered by the police, procurature, public authority) | ||
| Private, extrajudicial (such opinion may be used in the court as a substantive support, source of arguments, source of further evidence requests, motion or request for an evidence, private document evidence, basis for a supplementary opinion of another expert, or for appointing an expert, etc.) | ||
| Mandatority/not | Mandatory (required by the law) | |
| Facultative | ||
| Form of realisation | Independent, individual expert | |
| Collective (prepared by two or more veterinary surgeons) and complex (one opinion prepared by the veterinary expert and expert(s) from another field of expertise) | ||
| Institutional (prepared by scientific institutions, public veterinary administrative institutions, veterinary clinics, or veterinary laboratories; form excluded in some jurisdictions, yet very useful in veterinary science, where elaborate opinions that require equipment and many specialists can be developed) | ||
| Content of the opinion/report | Sensu largo (containing course of activities, examinations, and conclusions, as well as additional documents, e.g., results of laboratory tests) | |
| Sensu stricto (solely conclusions, allowed predominantly in the course of purely clinical or administrative practice) | ||
| Form of the opinion/report | Oral | |
| Written | ||
| Mixed | ||
| Type of material | Abstract (theoretical) | |
| Examination-based | ||
| Based on case files | ||
| Based on case files and examination | ||
| Order, task assigned, or importance | Primordial | |
| Ultimate | ||
| Partial | Preliminary | |
| Provisional | ||
| Supplementary (by the same expert as the primordial one) | ||
| Accessory | ||
| Counter-expertise (by another veterinary expert besides the primordial one, having the same value as evidence) | ||
| Super-expertise (in German: Oberexpertise; improperly named “consulting expertise” by some authors; by other veterinary experts besides the previous expert(s), evaluating previous opinion(s), having higher value as evidence; type present only in some jurisdictions, such as Switzerland, while in others it is explicitly excluded by the law) | ||
| Type of expert’s conclusion or justification | Categorical (unequivocal) | |
| Probable (alternate) | ||
| Content of expert’s conclusion or justification | Total | |
| Partial | ||