The Georgia Medical Malpractice Expert Affidavit

The affidavit is a medical expert's sworn statement, filed with your complaint, that a provider was negligent in at least one identified way and what in the record shows it.

The rule covers 26 licensed professions, among them medical doctors, osteopathic physicians, nurses, physician assistants, dentists, pharmacists, and physical therapists, plus the practice group or licensed hospital sued over what one of them did. A Georgia crash or fall claim can be filed on the complaint alone, so the affidavit is what sets malpractice apart from most other personal injury claims across Georgia.

One Specific Negligent Act or Omission

The statute requires the affidavit to "set forth specifically at least one negligent act or omission claimed to exist and the factual basis for each such claim."^[1] The act has to be named in terms a court can test, such as a radiologist reading a mass as benign or a nurse failing to report falling oxygen levels.

The Factual Basis for Each Claim

A bare conclusion that the provider was negligent does not satisfy the statute. The expert ties the opinion to the record, such as the timing of an order, a lab value nobody acted on, or a nursing note that contradicts the plan of care. An expert can swear only to what the chart supports, which is why the records come first.

Filed on the Same Day as the Complaint

Subsection (a) puts the affidavit in the same filing as the complaint, and Georgia gives no general window afterward to find an expert, so the review happens before the lawsuit exists. The one exception is a 45-day period for a deadline that is days away, and its conditions are strict.

An Expert Competent to Testify

The person who signs must be an expert who could testify at trial. Georgia's evidence code applies its malpractice qualification rules to the affiant, so an affidavit from someone who does not meet them fails the statute.

An expert qualifies to sign only if, on the date of the care being challenged, the expert was licensed to practice in the state where he or she practiced or taught, and had been regularly doing the kind of work at issue.^[2] Regularly doing the work means one of two things, measured back from that date:

• Active practice. Practicing the same specialty for at least three of the last five years, often enough to know the procedure, diagnosis, or treatment the defendant performed.
• Teaching. Teaching that specialty for at least three of the last five years as an employed faculty member at an accredited school.

The judge decides whether the frequency was enough, and on a party's motion can hold a pretrial hearing on the expert's qualifications, finished by the final pretrial conference.

The expert must also belong to the same profession as the defendant, though a medical doctor and a doctor of osteopathy may testify about each other's care. A physician who supervised or taught nurses, nurse anesthetists, nurse midwives, physician assistants, or physical or occupational therapists during three of the five years before the care can testify to their standard, but none of them can testify about a physician's.

An out-of-state specialist can qualify, because the license that counts is the one where the expert practiced or taught. A case that challenges both a surgeon's technique and a nurse's monitoring can need two affiants, each matched to the care being judged. Other states draw these lines differently, and a state-by-state look at the standard of care and the experts allowed to prove it shows how far apart they sit.

At a qualification hearing, defense lawyers keep coming back to how often our expert did this exact work in the years before the care. The key to a good hearing is having answers for these questions, with numbers, before the expert opens the chart.

The affidavit does not stop the clock. A Georgia malpractice claim must be brought within two years after the date the injury or death occurred, and the five-year statute of repose bars any claim filed more than five years after the negligent act itself, whenever the harm comes to light.^[3]

Because the affidavit is filed with the complaint, the records requests, the expert's review, and the signed affidavit all have to fit inside those two years.

Three situations change the count:

• A foreign object. When something such as a sponge or an instrument is left in the body, the claim must be brought within one year after the negligence is discovered. Chemical compounds, fixation devices, and prosthetic devices do not count as foreign objects.^[4]
• A young child. A child hurt before age five has until two years after the fifth birthday to file, and the repose period ends at the tenth birthday.^[5]
• A state-employed provider. When the provider worked for a State agency or a state-run facility, the Georgia Tort Claims Act requires written notice to the State within 12 months of when the loss was or should have been discovered.^[6] That notice, and the other rules for claims against a Georgia state agency, can come due well before the two-year limit.

Counted backward from whichever deadline applies, the time left for the expert work decides whether the affidavit goes in with the complaint or the case has to rely on the narrow 45-day exception.

A complaint filed with no affidavit, and no claim to the 45-day exception, faces a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim. A complaint filed with a flawed affidavit gets a chance to fix it.

A defendant who says the affidavit is defective, whether vague about the negligent act, missing a factual basis, or signed by an expert who does not qualify, must say so with specificity in a motion to dismiss filed by the close of discovery. The plaintiff may cure the defect by amendment within 30 days of service of that motion, and the judge may extend that time as justice requires.

Thirty days is a short time to find, retain, and prepare a new specialist, so the expert's qualifications are worth checking against § 24-7-702 before the affidavit is ever signed.

Georgia's renewal statute lets a plaintiff refile a dismissed case that was first filed in time, either within the original limitation period or within six months after the dismissal, whichever is later. Once the limitation period has expired, that privilege can be used only once.^[7]

The affidavit statute closes that route in one situation. If the complaint was filed without the required affidavit and the defendant raised it in a motion to dismiss filed with its first responsive pleading, the case cannot be renewed after the limitation period expires, unless the court finds the plaintiff had the affidavit in time and left it off by mistake.

Georgia's 2025 tort reform law, SB 68, left the affidavit statute alone but narrowed a related option. A plaintiff can now dismiss a case by simple notice only before the 60th day after the opposing party serves its answer; after that, it takes a stipulation signed by every party who has appeared or a court order.^[8] The old cutoff was the swearing of the first witness, and the change reaches cases already pending when the law took effect on April 21, 2025.

Once that 60th day passes, a plaintiff who finds an affidavit problem cannot drop the case and refile alone; the defense or the judge has to agree.

A Georgia patient suing Georgia providers files in state court. A case can go to federal court when the patient is a citizen of a different state from every defendant and more than $75,000 is at stake, as when an Alabama or South Carolina resident is treated in Columbus or Augusta.^[9]

On January 20, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Berk v. Choy that Delaware's affidavit-of-merit law does not apply in federal court, because Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8 already sets what a complaint must contain.^[10] The case before the Court involved Delaware's statute. Georgia's rule is built the same way, with the affidavit attached to the complaint, so a Georgia malpractice case in federal court now carries a strong argument that § 9-11-9.1 does not apply there.

In state court the rule applies as written. In either court a jury hears the standard of care and causation from qualified experts, so the review the affidavit requires is work the case needs wherever it is filed.

An expert signs on the strength of the record, and a complete record gets you an answer sooner. Start with these documents:

• The hospital chart. Orders, progress notes, nursing notes, and medication records.
• The imaging itself. The studies on disc, with the written reports.
• Lab results. Each value with its collection and reporting times.
• Procedure reports. Operative, anesthesia, and pathology reports.
• Office records. Notes from the doctors who treated you before and after.
• Delivery records. For a birth injury, the fetal monitoring strips and the delivery record.

Federal law gives you the right to most of these, and the rules for requesting your own chart and imaging limit what a provider can charge and how long it can take. Write down the dates too: each visit, each unanswered call, when symptoms changed, and when another doctor told you something had gone wrong. Those dates set the deadlines.

Once an expert supports the claim, the rest of the case is proving causation and damages, the work that carries Georgia medical malpractice cases from filing to trial.