Azarian v. Witte

The “attesting expert provision”1 of the Maryland Health Care Malpractice Claims Act (the “Act”)2 provides that all claimants under the Act must file a “certificate of a qualified expert,” more commonly known as “a certificate of merit,”3 in which an expert attests that “a departure from the standard of care” by the defendant health care provider was the proximate cause of the claimant’s medical injury. That provision, howev*75er, limits who may make such an attestation by stating that an “attesting expert may not devote annually more than 20 percent of the expert’s professional activities to…