ABSTRACT
Practising expert witnesses should ensure they comply with the relevant current court practice directions to avoid embarrassment at trial and to their client. Inspection is usually to find markings on the originals but in practice a party usually telephones and asks for copies of whichever documents it seeks from the lists and pays for them. Litigation privilege may attach but there is merit in providing opinion to the client's legal adviser to seek to attract legal professional privilege, in which case the advice should clearly state that the advice is given to assist the legal adviser to advise the client. Significant costs will have accrued prior to a hearing: the sequence of pleadings, further and better particulars, discovery, witness/expert witness reports, counsel-all of which are likely to be logged on hourly basis. An expert witness should not seek to advance his client's case; the expert should be seen to be genuinely independent and neither partial nor committed to a party's case.
