Lawyer Monthly Magazine August 2020 Edition

EXPERT WITNESS 71 AUG 2020 | WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM JJ&A has been providing expert witness reports since 1987. We are a small team of highly experienced experts and administrators, who take pride in offering a personal service to all our clients. Our team of specialist nurses and occupational therapists have a wide range of experiences, enabling us to provide evidence on both Quantum and Liability cases. About Jane James & Associates “As a team, we regularly review our operational practice to ensure that we are doing the task efficiently and in a cost effective manner.” of an IT project undertaken by the Support Services Team, who advised us that with a change of mindset and additional training for experts, the benefits of a paperless system would be significant. The process started with identifying a suitable platform, which turned out to be easy and very cost effective. We had in the past attempted to go paperless, but the cost of a bespoke management package was hard to justify. We are successfully using Microsoft SharePoint, which means our documents are secure on a cloud- based system. We have had very positive feedback from all of our experts and the following benefits have been easy to identify: • Significant savings on storage, printing and postage. • Administrative time has reduced significantly. However, not all our clients send documents in easy access folders, so there can still be quite a lot of tidying up, but we are working collaboratively with them and positive that we will all benefit from time saving in due course. • Documents are easily accessible and logged in a way that makes it straight forward for experts and support services to find them. • The documents are more secure than in hard copy and much less likely to get misplaced. • Pleased that we are meeting our part of our corporate environmental responsibility, along with other initiatives. As a team, we are proud of our achievements and would encourage others to go forth! the experts are kept up to date with non- clinical evidence; for example, regional cost of care, new items of equipment, costs and development in rehabilitation services and many others. We have strong internal administrative systems, which mean that the reports undergo a thorough proofing and are sent within agreed timeframes. Can you share more about going paperless and the impact that you are hoping to make? JJ&A has been around for over 30 years and as an organisation, we have dealt with huge volumes of records in hard copy. In the past, when considering office space, there has always been an emphasis on having ample storage for the voluminous number of boxes of evidence, not to mention medical records. This is in addition to having costly administrative staff to sort and log all the evidence, which often meant forwarding these documents to experts working remotely. As a team, we regularly review our operational practice to ensure that we are doing the task efficiently and in a cost effective manner. We are always mindful of keeping on costs to a minimum, both for ourselves and, of course, our clients. The decision to go paperless was initially part What difference does 1:1 peer support make? At JJ&A, we adopt a number of models to ensure our experts are well supported, both clinically and in their expert work. Peer support is one valued method and we do this individually and as a team, with regular formal and informal sessions. We also ensure that all new experts receive 1:1 mentoring from an experienced expert throughout their first ten cases. Our evidence suggests that clinically our experts are very current in their knowledge; however, adapting that knowledge and creating a document that assists the court and is CPR compliant is what they find most find challenging. What steps do you take to make sure that the reports are of a high standard? In order to ensure all our reports are of a high standard, we ask our experts to be not only clinically robust, but also to undertake additional external training to fully engage with their roles as experts. All our experts have completed, or are in the process of completing, their training through Bond Solon (CUBS). We have regular in-house training, delivered by both our own experts and by other organisations. This ensures