Lawyer Monthly - January 2022 Edition

EXPERT WITNESS 45 JAN 2022 | WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM based on their experience and the information. My report will state that ”I report as an expert witness not as a witness of fact”. Experts are required to comply with Practice Direction 35, which states:- “2.1. Expert Evidence should be the independent product of the expert uninfluenced by the pressures of the litigation. “2.2. Experts should assist the Court by providing objective, unbiased opinions on matters within their expertise and should not assume the role of an advocate.” Experts who do not comply with the Practice Direction are likely to be censored by the Court and there have been several examples of this. How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected the way you work on cases like this? The pandemic has had a very significant effect on the position in several ways. For one, there is now very much a focus on working from home. This has a significant impact on working with other people, allocating and controlling work and discussing information and findings on a day-to-day basis as the case progresses. That has not been ideal but works well in most circumstances once you adjust to it. Furthermore, almost all meetings with lawyers, clients, sources of information and some hearings have been online, with varying degrees of difficulty. This has worked much better than I would have expected in a fair number of cases. It works best with small numbers where you all have the relevant documents. For example, I recently had an experts’ meeting on a case; the other expert was in London and I am based in Bristol. We would normally, without the pandemic restrictions, have discussed where to meet – possibly halfway, in Swindon – but as it was it worked very well on Zoom. It does not work as well in larger meetings and where documents are exchanged at the time. It is particularly difficult in respect of a client in custody, where you need to go through documents with them, but which they do not have, as it is very hard to get documents to them in time for a meeting and confidentially. Outside of independent determination, virtually all the cases that I currently deal with are run by the Court. In the Pandemic Court, business and transactions have slowed right down. Some staff are at home and the lockdown restrictions make conducting Court business much harder and slower. For example, difficulties involved in holding a jury trial and complying with the pandemic safeguards has meant severe delays. Just getting a Court ruling on a matter, which impacts the conduct or basis of a case, can take considerable time. I carry out a lot of valuations of companies in dispute situations. That happens in quite a cross section of my work, such as shareholder, partnership and matrimonial disputes, professional negligence, disputes following the sale of a company and once in a murder trial and a corporate manslaughter case. The precise date of a valuation is always important, as this affects the financial information available to consider.