No sooner have we posted about experts doing their job efficiently, professionally and objectively than along come two judgements where the experts involved have very definitely not come up to scratch. Both experts were guilty of expanding and exaggerating their opinions to try to benefit of their client’s case.

 

In Morriss v London Borough of Hillingdon the cause of a motorbike accident was said by one expert to be the “the most dangerous site on a distributor road he had seen in his 55 years’ experience.”. This was a risky position to take given he’d not been able to examine the relevant stretches of road as they were at the time of the accident. The judge conclude that his evidence was “inappropriately partisan and exaggerated: the evidence concerning the collision site demonstrably showed it was not the extremely dangerous site that he characterised it to be, not least that there had never been a motorcycle accident there before: “

 

In Freeman & Ors v Home Farm Ellingham a planning expert took things even further. Not only did he give evidence outside the pleaded issues, which revolved around a loss of value in a plot of land,  he generated a set of plans for a development that had never been contemplated, orchestrating, as the judge explained, the production of “what appears to be factual evidence, but that evidence was entirely self-generated by him, and his firm.” That somewhat cavalier approach may explain why in court he appears to have found it difficult to accept instructions from the judge, who records that he “insisted on answering questions that he had himself posed even when asked by the court not to.” and on one occasion ignored an instruction from  the judge not to elaborate on what should have been a simple yes or no answer.

 

In the motorbike case the evidence of an expert with a great deal of experience was in the end valueless and the planning experts evidence was ruled inadmissible (or alternatively given no weight). The moral for lawyers and clients is that expert opinions that fall too heavily on your side should be related with suspicion, if they are not credible it will be obvious in court and end costing you money and very probably your case.