SwornRates
Defend your expert witness rate with federal court orders
SwornRates extracts the rates federal judges set, reduce, and approve from US court orders and fee disputes, with the case, court, year, and a link to the docket behind every number. We assemble them into a compact exhibit you hand to retaining counsel when someone calls your fee unreasonable. Setting a rate rather than defending one? The same bands answer that, free, by specialty, on the rates pages.
One-time purchase, no subscription. Delivered to your inbox in minutes. Full refund if it doesn't cover your specialty and setting.
The problem
"What should I charge?" has never had a good answer
Every testifying expert has asked it, and the available answers are a colleague's guess, a Reddit thread, or a $150 questionnaire of self-reported numbers. None of those survives contact with opposing counsel. When a fee gets challenged under Rule 26(b)(4)(E), the only numbers that carry weight are the ones judges have already put in writing.
Those numbers exist. Federal courts set and reduce expert rates in written orders constantly. They're just buried across millions of docket entries, so nobody uses them.
| $500/hr | median court-determined deposition rate for physicians in U.S. federal courts — 36 named experts, 2 unnamed-expert values, 64 determinations in 57 orders, 26 courts, 2011–2025 |
| $750/hr | 75th percentile of the same |
| 1,513 | rate records in the frame the exhibits draw from — each verified against its public court document and linked to it |
| 2010–2026 | window of the 1,513 rate records above — the newest are from 2026 |
The difference
Every other source is self-reported
| Source | Where the numbers come from | Can you cite it in a fee dispute? |
|---|---|---|
| SEAK fee survey | Questionnaire of experts' own answers, national medians, $150 one-time | Weakly. It's hearsay about what people say they charge. |
| Free fee calculators | Self-reported "starting at" ranges, built as lead-gen for referral marketplaces | No citation offered. |
| Asking colleagues | Anecdote | No. |
| SwornRates | Rates federal judges set, reduced, or approved in written orders, extracted from the public record | Yes. Case name, docket number, court, year, and the order's own language, for every row. |
What you get
One document built to survive opposing counsel
The rate-defense exhibit
A two- to three-page PDF showing where your rate sits against court-approved comparables, with percentile bands and the ten most relevant orders quoted and cited. Built to be attached to an engagement letter or a fee-dispute response. See a live sample, rendered from real records.
The corpus behind it
Court-determined hourly rates from US federal civil cases, set, reduced, or approved in written orders, each verified against the order's own language. Every number in your exhibit links to its docket on CourtListener, so anyone challenging it can check it themselves.
Yours for good
One purchase, no subscription, no account. The PDF lands in your inbox in minutes, with a private order page for re-downloads, and if you typo your name, rate, or setting, we re-render it free within 7 days.
The offer
Get your rate-defense exhibit
One document, one price, no subscription. Tell us your specialty, your setting, and your rate; we prepare your exhibit from the current corpus and deliver it as a PDF.
- Your rate against court-approved comparables, with percentile bands
- The most relevant orders quoted and cited, every one linked to its docket
- Delivered to your inbox in minutes
- Full refund if it doesn't cover your specialty and setting
Questions
The fine print
- Where does the data actually come from?
- Public US federal court records. Docket entries and orders come through CourtListener/RECAP's sanctioned API; the vaccine program's published fee decisions come from the court's own record (govinfo.gov and the Court of Federal Claims' ECF). We extract rate determinations, then verify each one against the order's own quoted language before it enters the corpus. Federal court records are public-domain government works.
- Why only US federal civil courts?
- The trade-off runs in your favor: expert-heavy litigation (patent, products liability, antitrust, securities, med-mal in diversity) skews federal, so the covered slice is the high-rate slice. State-court records aren't published through the public-record pipeline this corpus is built on, so they're not covered yet; we may extend to states whose records open up. Federal criminal expert pay runs through administered CJA caps and sealed vouchers, so it's excluded on purpose.
- Is my specialty covered?
- Every band we publish is on the rates pages, so you can check in one click. We add specialties as the court record supports them, and buyer requests steer which slices we extract next. Not listed? Ask us to cover it and we'll tell you honestly whether we can.
- Couldn't I just search CourtListener myself?
- Yes, it's free and public, and if you have the hours we'd genuinely encourage it. What you're paying for is the extraction, verification, deduplication, and normalization already done, kept current, and formatted into something you can hand to counsel.
- Is this legal advice?
- No. It's a research corpus with citations. What to charge, and how to argue it, is between you and your counsel.