Memory is fallible, so how should litigation lawyers be aware of this when preparing witness statements? Mary Young, partner, and Laurence Clarke, senior associate, in the dispute resolution team at Kingsley Napley, discuss the unreliability of memory and court procedure rules introduced nearly four years ago on record-keeping and preparation of witness statements.
One problem, as they explain, is that ‘through the process of remembering or recalling events, an individual can change or edit their own recollection’.
Young and Clarke write: ‘The difficulty for a judge is that they may be faced with two witnesses who give different accounts of the same events, while at the same time both being entirely honest and fully believing that the evidence they give is accurate.’RELATED ARTICLES
