UAB v Oneta: the smart glasses got the headlines, the expert evidence is the lesson

On the first afternoon of a trial in the Insolvency and Companies List, counsel for the defendants told the judge she could hear interference coming from the witness box, and asked whether the witness could take off his smart glasses. She knew such glasses existed. The interpreter sitting beside him said she could hear it too.

The glasses came off. A few questions later, while the interpreter was translating, the witness's phone, in his inner jacket pocket, began playing a voice out loud. He took it out. A call log photographed afterwards showed a call placed three minutes before he stepped into the box, to a contact saved under a nonsense name, still connected while he gave evidence.

The case is UAB Business Enterprise & Anor v Oneta Ltd & Ors [2026] EWHC 543 (Ch), decided by ICC Judge Agnello KC and handed down on 11 March 2026. The glasses have had a great deal of attention. The part of the judgment that should interest an expert witness has had almost none.

What the judge did about the coaching

The immediate steps are worth recording, because they are the closest thing the case offers to a procedure. The glasses were removed and, with the phone, placed in the hands of the witness's own solicitor. Counsel inspected the glasses at the end of the day and found they connected to the phone when switched on. The next morning the remote video link was switched off. The witness agreed to his phone being checked, and the call log was photographed.

The judge found he was being assisted or coached in his replies until it was stopped. She expressly declined to decide who was doing it. Counsel submitted it was the lawyer who was the only person watching on the video link, and the judge accepted he was on the link, but went no further. There is no finding that the English legal team knew anything about it, and no criticism of them anywhere in the judgment.

What followed is the part most often described inaccurately. The evidence was not excluded. Exclusion is a ruling that material is inadmissible and never enters the reckoning. Here the judge heard the evidence and then rejected it on assessment, concluding that she rejected his evidence in its entirety, covering both his oral answers and his witness statements.

Nor did she reject it on the coaching alone. The conclusion was cumulative: his untruthfulness about the glasses and the calls, a disregard for what he had signed on disclosure, an inconsistency about his English, and the statements themselves. On those, her finding was that they read as arguments and submissions rather than evidence, and were clearly prepared by others. A second witness admitted his statement had been drafted mainly by the same lawyer.

Once the glasses were gone, the judge recorded, he was effectively sticking to a script, answering with what he had been given even when it did not answer the question.

The finding that should concern experts

A handwriting expert had been instructed jointly to say whether signatures on the disputed documents were genuine. Her opinion was rejected too.

The reason had nothing to do with her competence, her independence or her method. She had been asked to determine authenticity in what the judge called a complete vacuum of the facts. She was given documents and asked whether the signatures were real, without the surrounding factual picture that would tell her what she was actually looking at. Presented with that, the judge weighed the opinion against everything else in the case and declined to accept it.

Courts are ordinarily reluctant to set aside the evidence of a jointly instructed expert, and the judgment acknowledges that. It happened anyway, because an opinion formed without context could not be reconciled with the rest of the evidence.

For anyone who takes instructions, that is the transferable lesson in this case, and it is entirely independent of the technology. An expert cannot always control what they are sent. What they can control is whether they say so. An opinion given on a narrow question, in isolation from the facts that give the question meaning, is fragile in exactly the way this one turned out to be, and the protection is to record in the report what you were given, what you were not given, and what your opinion therefore does and does not rest on. A report that states its own limits survives the moment a judge starts weighing it against the wider evidence. One that does not, has nothing to fall back on.

How it was actually caught

Not by a protocol, and not by any check the court had in place. It was caught by ear, by two people who happened to be close enough to hear a noise: opposing counsel, who knew what smart glasses were, and the interpreter standing next to the witness. The judge had separately noticed that he paused for a long time before answering, but that observation did not trigger anything on its own; it became significant afterwards, when the contrast in his answers was obvious.

The conclusive proof was accidental as well. No voice was audible until the glasses were removed and disconnected, at which point the audio rerouted to the handset and announced itself to the room. Had the audio gone to an earpiece instead, there would have been nothing to hear.

That is worth sitting with by anyone comfortable that remote and hybrid hearings are adequately policed. The detection here depended on a hardware quirk and on physical proximity. Neither is a control.

What the case does not do

It lays down nothing. There is no general guidance, no protocol for devices in the witness box, no direction on screening remote observers beyond the conditions already imposed when the video link was granted. Most strikingly for a case being cited as a witness-coaching authority, it cites no authority on witness training at all: not Momodou, not Ultraframe, nothing. The judge treated the whole thing as a question of credibility, which is what it was.

The judgment also records no costs order, no contempt proceedings and no referral to any regulator or authority. Costs were reported separately as having gone against the claimants on the indemnity basis, but that is not in this judgment and the reasoning for it is not published.

So the case is not authority for a proposition. It is an illustration, and a vivid one, of how quickly a case built on one person's credibility collapses when that credibility goes. The claimants lost, though not solely because of the glasses: the other witnesses were rejected on their own separate grounds, and the expert evidence on the central document was rejected as well.

Three things to take from it

• If you are instructed, ask what you have not been sent. The expert here answered the question she was given. The problem was the question, and the report did not say so.
• State the limits of the opinion in the report. Not as a disclaimer, but as a description of the material the opinion rests on. It is the only thing that holds when a judge starts weighing your view against everything else.
• A statement drafted by somebody else reads like one. The judge identified it from the prose, before any of the other findings. Evidence that arrives full of argument is not evidence.

None of that requires the case to be more than it is. It decided one dispute about who owned a company, on the credibility of the people describing it, and the technology was the mechanism rather than the point.