What Is an Expert Opinion? How It Differs from a Court Expert Report and When It Is Needed

There is a technical question at the heart of your case: whether an e-mail was really sent on the date it claims, who deleted a particular file, whether a camera recording runs without a break. The court puts that question to a court-appointed expert. You can put the same question to a specialist of your own choosing and file the answer with the case. That answer is what is called an expert opinion.

In short: what is an expert opinion?

An expert opinion is the scientific view that one of the parties obtains from a specialist of its own choosing on a technical matter in dispute. In practice it is also called a party expert view, a scientific opinion or a technical opinion; they all describe the same thing. The opinion is filed with the case as evidence and the judge weighs it freely, alongside the other evidence.

How it differs from a court expert report

Both answer a technical question. The difference lies in who asked for the report and on whose behalf it was written.

• Who appoints? A court-appointed expert is assigned by the court or the prosecutor from the official expert lists. A party chooses its own specialist.
• Who pays? The court expert's fee is met from the costs of the proceedings. The fee for an expert opinion is paid by the party who asked for it.
• Which question is answered? A court expert answers the questions the court puts. A specialist answers the question the party puts — scientifically, and with the scope written out plainly.
• Does it bind the judge? Neither does. The judge weighs both reports together with the rest of the evidence. What gives a report its weight is not the title behind it but its method and whether it can be reviewed.

One point worth keeping in mind: being a court expert is an appointment. A private company or individual cannot issue a court expert report of its own accord; the report you can obtain as a party is an expert opinion.

The legal basis

In civil cases: Article 293 CCP. Under Article 293 of the Turkish Code of Civil Procedure, the parties may obtain a scientific opinion from their own specialist on the matter in dispute. On request or of its own motion, the court may decide to summon the specialist who prepared the report to the hearing and hear them; the judge and the parties may put questions to the specialist. If the specialist fails to attend without a valid excuse, the report is not taken into consideration.

In criminal cases: Article 67/6 CCrP. Paragraph 6 of Article 67 of the Code of Criminal Procedure allows the public prosecutor, the intervening party and their counsel, the suspect or the accused, defence counsel and the legal representative to obtain a scientific opinion from their own specialist in connection with the investigation or prosecution being conducted. The opinion may concern the technical side of the event or the assessment of a court expert report.

The point most often missed in practice: both statutes say plainly that obtaining an opinion is not in itself a ground for extra time. So you need to plan from the outset, against the case timetable, when the opinion will be filed — examination and reporting take time.

When is it needed in cases that turn on digital evidence?

In IT-related disputes, an opinion is usually sought for one of these questions:

• Is an e-mail, a WhatsApp exchange or a document genuine, is its date correct, was it altered afterwards?
• From a computer or a server: under whose account, when, and to where was data copied?
• When and by what operation were deleted files removed; was the deletion deliberate or the result of ordinary use?
• Does a camera recording run without a break, or has anything been cut out or inserted?
• What was done on a departing employee's company computer in the days before they left?

If one of these questions is decisive in your file and the technical assessment already on record does not answer it in full, an opinion is evidence worth considering.

What makes a good opinion?

A technical report filed with a court carries weight not through the conclusion it reaches but through how that conclusion was reached. With digital evidence that has a concrete meaning: the examination is carried out not on the original device but on a bit-for-bit copy (an image); the copy is shown to be identical to the original through hash values; the tools used are listed with their versions; and every finding is documented with a file path and a timestamp. If one of these is missing, the other side can easily open the report to challenge. We have set out each of these principles, and the section-by-section structure of a report, on our expert opinion service page.

If you are looking for a sample expert opinion

Most of the samples circulating online belong to other fields — construction, medicine, traffic — and do not fit a digital examination. More importantly, what makes an opinion sound is not its template but the examination method behind it, and filling in the shape of someone else's report does not produce that method. That is why we do not share a template; instead we write out plainly which sections a report needs to contain, and why.