In a recently developed quadrature method (quadrature by expansion or QBX),
it was demonstrated that weakly singular or singular layer potentials can be
evaluated rapidly and accurately on surface by making use of local expansions
about carefully chosen off-surface points. In this paper, we derive estimates
for the rate of convergence of these local expansions, providing the analytic
foundation for the QBX method. The estimates may also be of mathematical
interest, particularly for microlocal or asymptotic analysis in potential
theory