Chris Pamplin offers some tips on avoiding your expert putting you in the dock
Lawyers owe a professional duty of care to their clients to instruct expert witnesses who understand the expert’s role and duties in the civil justice system. Nevertheless, as recent judicial criticism of experts has demonstrated, not all expert witnesses understand their role. This is why Pt 35 of the Civil Procedure Rules was changed recently so that an expert witness has to declare his awareness of the rules (whatever that means).
So how can it be that experts still get instructed who don’t understand their role and the rules, and what can you do to provide objective evidence of your efforts to avoid such experts?
At the heart of the problem lies the sheer complexity of the process of instructing experts. From what follows, you’ll see that at least 50 individual steps can be identified in the instruction process. Furthermore, for it all to work properly, the system expects you and an expert (two people drawn from starkly different backgrounds—just ask each to define “certainty”) to understand and comply with
