Expert Witness Journal Issue 63 October 2025 - Flipbook - Page 11
From Frustration to E昀케ciency:
An improved roadmap for Expert
Witness Reports
by Bindweep Kaur, Medical Expert Witness Alliance (MEWA) LLP
www.mewa.org.uk
The legal proceedings within the UK rely heavily
on expert witness reports. The experts play a
pivotal role in providing their specialist opinion
on complex matters to aid the Judge and the Jury
with their decision making process. They also
provide valuable insights to barristers and solicitors
regarding their cases.
A very common source of confusion for the
experts is how the documents are named. Di昀昀erent
organisations and instructing parties name
their documents in di昀昀erent ways. And these
nomenclatures can mean di昀昀erent things to the
experts. Therefore, when experts receive the
documents, they expect and assume the documents
to provide them a certain kind of information but
sometimes, the nomenclature is misleading and
therefore those documents do not provide them
the information they thought would be available in
those documents. This leads to wasted time for the
expert to review these documents and then to obtain
the correct documents from the instructing parties.
However, the experts are often faced with challenges
whilst providing their expert witness reports. There
are various factors that play a role in frustrating the
experts and some simple measures can e昀昀ectively
allay these concerns and help in an e昀케cient delivery
of expert witness reports.
In some situations, the process of delivery of
documents can be streamlined to ensure that the
experts have everything with them in an organised
manner. Receiving documents in a piecemeal
manner means that the experts have to review the
documents several times which lead to extra time
being spent on cases and can eventually lead to
funding concerns being raised. Depending on the
speciality of the case, sometimes documents are
sent via links from NHS organisations or other
healthcare providers. However, the experts are not
granted access to these links till the experts tries and
fails to open these links. This leads to frustration
and wasted time for the experts.
1. Documents Submission
The documents provided to an expert form the basis
of their opinion and their expert witness report.
Hence, getting across the correct documents, in
correct formats and in a timely manner lay the
foundations of an e昀昀ective engagement process
between experts and instructing parties.
Depending on the complexity of the case, various
di昀昀erent type of documents may be required to
be reviewed in order to answer the questions laid
out in the Letter of Instructions (LOI). Hence, it’s
pertinent that the documents provided are relevant
and all of them need to be reviewed by the expert.
Sometimes, the experts come across scenarios
where the relevant documents are missing or there
are duplicate documents in the bundle. Both of
these scenarios can lead to di昀케culties. Missing
documents leads to confusion, time spent in
ensuring that the documents are actually missing,
time spent in liaising with the instructing party to
obtain those documents, undue pressure on the
experts to still submit their report in the timeframes
previously agreed and in some cases, it can lead to
delays in report submission. Similarly, duplicate
documents leads to increased number of documents
for the expert to review which can lead to funding
concerns being raised by the experts, wasted time
in identifying the relevant documents from a heap
of duplicate documents as well as mistrust in the
instructing party’s e昀케ciency in managing the
expert witness process.
EXPERT WITNESS JOURNAL
Furthermore, some specialities require imaging to
be reviewed and these need to be sent to the expert
in a speci昀椀ed format. Sometimes, despite repeated
e昀昀orts, it takes a huge amount of time for the
instructing parties to understand what’s required,
how to obtain those documents/ imaging and
how to provide these to the experts in the correct
formats. Despite the time taken in arranging these
documents/ imaging, there is an expectation on
the expert to complete the report in the previously
agreed timeframes, which seems unreasonable and
adds to the disappointment of experts with the
expert witness process.
It is common practice for the experts to base their
fees on the number of documents that need to be
reviewed, in addition to the complexities of the
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OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2025
