Is expert witness hot-tubbing the future, asks Mark Solon
Earlier this year saw the conclusion of a pilot in the Manchester technology court and mercantile court of the practice that has colloquially become known as hot-tubbing.
Hot-tubbing’s formal and rather less glamorous title, concurrent expert evidence, is nonetheless one of the most exciting developments to take place within expert evidence for some time.
What is hot-tubbing?
The practice, which originated in Australia, involves experts meeting before a judge to debate the key issues in the case, with the judge acting as a chair. The experts will already have prepared written reports in the normal way, and come up with a joint statement of areas on which they agree and disagree. During the meeting, barristers are able to grill experts on the areas of disagreement and experts are able to ask each other questions; challenging each other’s evidence and testing each other’s knowledge of the case and of their specialism.
The procedure is a marked departure from our traditional adversarial system, in which an expert is cross-examined rigorously by a barrister during trial
