Balance of Probabilities, the Standard Behind Medico-Legal Opinions
Most people outside the law assume a claim succeeds when the evidence proves something happened. It does not need to. A civil claim succeeds when it is more likely than not to have happened, which is a lower and quite different bar, and understanding exactly how low is essential to reading, writing or challenging a […]
When an Expert Witness Is Criticised by the Court
Judges comment on expert evidence in almost every trial that turns on it, and most of that comment is neutral. Occasionally it is not. An expert finds their reasoning, their independence or their basic competence picked apart in open court, and then set out in a judgment that anyone can read. For the expert it […]
Hot-Tubbing and Giving Oral Evidence as an Expert Witness
An expert witness report is written work, prepared over weeks, checked and re-checked before it is served. Giving oral evidence is none of those things. When a case reaches trial and the judge wants to hear from the experts directly, the format may not be the sequential cross examination most people picture. Under Practice Direction […]
Expert Advisor vs Expert Witness, and Why the Difference Matters
An expert advisor works for the party who instructs them. An expert witness works for the court, even though one party usually pays the bill. That single difference decides who the opinion is written for, what the other side gets to see, and whether the same person can take both roles in the same case. […]
How to Write a High Quality Expert Witness Report
A court judges an expert report on whether it can be followed and trusted, not on how forcefully it argues. Practice Direction 35 sets out, in a numbered list, what a report has to contain, and much of the criticism experts attract in judgments comes from missing items on that list rather than from getting […]
How AI Is Changing Expert Witness Reports
Most experts who write for the civil courts already have an AI tool somewhere in the workflow. Usually it is dictation software, a search box, or a spellchecker that has quietly become something more. The question the courts are asking is not whether experts use these tools. It is whether the person reading the report […]
How Are Expert Witnesses Regulated in the UK?
Expert witnesses in the UK are regulated in two separate ways at once. Doctors and other healthcare professionals answer to their own professional regulator, the GMC for doctors, the HCPC for professions like psychology, for how they conduct themselves in legal work. On top of that, membership bodies such as the Expert Witness Institute hold […]
What Is Medico-Legal?
Medico-legal, also written medicolegal, describes anything that sits at the point where medicine and the law meet. In practice it means medical evidence, usually an expert report or examination, prepared to help a court, solicitor or insurer decide a legal question. This kind of report is written by a doctor for legal proceedings rather than […]
What Is a Single Joint Expert?
A single joint expert (SJE) is one expert instructed jointly by two or more parties in a legal case, rather than each side bringing in its own. The expert prepares a single report that goes to the whole court, and both parties rely on it rather than commissioning competing opinions. The same rules on what […]