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Speak to the teamPractical guidance for expert witnesses and injury law firms, on medical evidence, court-ready reporting, radiology and keeping clinical data compliant under UK law.
A statement of truth is a signed statement that the person making it believes the facts in a document are true (CPR 22.1(4)). This guide gives the exact wording for statements of case, witness statements and expert reports, explains who can sign and whether a witness is needed, and sets out what happens when a statement of truth is false.
Read articlePart 35 questions are written questions a party puts to the other side's expert, or to a single joint expert, about their report under CPR 35.6. They can be put once, within 28 days of service of the report, and only to clarify it unless the court or the other party agrees. This guide covers the rules, what counts as clarification, who pays, and how to draft and answer them.
An expert witness is a person with specialist knowledge, skill or experience who gives the court an independent opinion on a question it cannot decide unaided. This guide covers what expert witnesses do in UK civil claims, the overriding duty under CPR 35, who can act as one, how to become a medical expert witness, how experts are paid and when they can be sued.
A medico-legal report is a written opinion from a medical expert, prepared for a legal claim or proceedings. It explains a person's injuries or condition, what caused them and what the future is likely to hold, based on the medical records and usually an examination. In civil claims in England and Wales it is expert evidence under Part 35 of the Civil Procedure Rules.
Causation in clinical negligence has two stages. Factual causation asks whether the breach caused the injury, usually through the but for test on the balance of probabilities. Legal causation asks whether the law should hold the defendant responsible for that loss, looking at intervening acts, remoteness and the scope of the duty.
The Bolam test is the standard English law uses to decide whether a doctor was negligent. A doctor is not in breach of duty if they acted in accordance with a practice accepted as proper by a responsible body of medical opinion in the same field. Since Bolitho that opinion must stand up to logical analysis, and since Montgomery advice about risks is judged by what the patient needed to know.
CPR 35 is Part 35 of the Civil Procedure Rules, which governs expert evidence in civil claims in England and Wales. It limits expert evidence to what is reasonably required, puts the expert's duty to the court above any duty to the client, and, with Practice Direction 35, sets what every expert report must contain.
A claimant was fed answers through smart glasses while being cross-examined, and his evidence was rejected in full. That is the part everyone has written about. In the same judgment, a jointly instructed expert's opinion was also rejected, for a reason that has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with how the expert was instructed.
A High Court judge was given a quotation from a rule that does not exist. The chat transcripts show the AI warning, more than once, that the wording had not been verified against a primary source and should be checked before anyone relied on it. Nobody checked. The judgment is a lesson about supervision rather than about technology, and it reaches anyone who relies on work done by someone else.
A complainant used an AI tool to rehearse answers before cross-examination, and the trial was stopped. The Court of Appeal reversed that decision and ordered a retrial. The case is being reported as a ruling that AI preparation is witness coaching. Read against the judgment, that is not quite what happened, and the difference matters for anyone giving or handling evidence.
Yes. An expert witness can use AI for the reading: extracting facts, building a chronology and finding entries across a medico-legal bundle. The opinion must remain the expert's own, every AI-produced fact must be verified against its source page, and the Part 35 duty to the court is untouched by the tooling.
How to write an expert witness report comes down to a structure the court can follow and check. Lead with the opinion, work through the material and the reasoning, state the limitations plainly, and close with the statements Part 35 requires. This guide gives you the section-by-section shape, a template you can adapt, and the mandatory wording.
