When Is An Expert Witness, Not An Expert?

Obtaining an expert witness’s report is an important part of the personal injury claims process – but the expert must truly be ‘expert’ in the relevant field. The specialist injury lawyers at ParrisWhittaker in the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) and surrounding region have years of experience recovering compensation for injured individuals.

What’s the purpose of an expert witness?

If you are injured through no fault of your own, you have the legal right to claim personal injury compensation. To establish your claim, strong evidence will be need to demonstrate your case and to ensure you recover maximum compensation.

Perhaps the most central evidence to an injury claim is an expert witness report, usually from a doctor or other health professional who is a specialist in the type of injury involved.  Occasionally, another type of expert witness may also be asked to give evidence (eg. a mechanical engineer where there is a dispute concerning a vehicle causing the accident or technical expert in the workplace).

The medical expert will be asked to examine you and write a detailed report on your prognosis and how the injuries have affected your life. The expert’s report will then be disclosed to the other side. Often, this can lead to an early settlement which means lengthy and expensive litigation will be avoided (this is always our aim).

Expertise required

Expert witnesses owe several important duties to the court (set out in the Supreme Court Civil Procedure Rules 2022 (part 32). These duties include to assist the court impartially on “matters relevant to his or her expertise”. The nature and quality of the expert’s expertise is, therefore, of fundamental importance in any injury case.

Recently, the UK’s High Court clarified what it means to be an ‘expert’ for the purposes of giving expert evidence. The ruling¹ has an important persuasive effect on the TCI courts.

The case confirmed that the wording in the UK’s civil court rules, “within an expert’s expertise”,  does not extend to knowledge gleaned from research undertaken specifically for the purpose of the action in which the expert was commissioned to give evidence.

In this case, although the individual giving evidence was an expert in her field, she was not qualified to give evidence on certain technical aspects of the case. She therefore decided to research and educate herself on those aspects in order to give ‘expert’ evidence.

The judge decided it would be inappropriate to place any weight on the expert’s evidence on matters falling outside her core expertise. Her evidence on one of those issues was “extremely confused” (she even admitted she did not understand a concept) and her evidence was “wholly unreliable”.

The judge said: “A person does not become an expert by virtue of having acquired knowledge in the course of the case itself… An expert is instructed on the basis that they are a genuine expert in the relevant field, whose opinions may be relied upon and given weight by the court.”

How we can help you

As your attorneys, we would commission the best expert for your case to reflect the nature of your injuries and the circumstances in which they occurred. We avoid an ‘any expert will do’ policy, carefully selecting experts on a case-by-case basis to ensure we obtain the strongest evidence we can to support your claim.

For expert representation, contact the experienced personal injury litigation solicitors at ParrisWhittaker in TCI as early as possible. You can contact us at +1.242.352.6112 or info@parriswhittaker.com

¹Sycurio Ltd v PCI-Pal PLC & Anor [2023] EWHC 2161