Can I dispute an Expert Report?

In order to bring a successful clinical negligence or personal injury claim, you require expert evidence to support your case.  If you do not have supportive expert evidence a compensation claim cannot proceed.

We choose the experts who advise in your case very carefully from a database of approved and ranked experts. We constantly keep this database up to date following the most recent instructions and by discussing experts’ performances with others in the firm. We discuss our choice of expert and their specialism with you.

When the expert is instructed, we provide them with a full copy of all of your medical records which have been sorted and reviewed by us. The expert will also be provided with a copy of your witness statement to explain your side of the story. The expert will then carefully review your case and provide a report.

Experts’ reports can be unsupportive of your case for a number of reasons, which may turn on medical evidence alone or the contents of the medical records and your own evidence.

We will ask you to carefully review any expert’s report obtained in relation to your claim and let us have your comments. Depending on the reasons why the report is unsupportive and your comments, it may be necessary to either ask the expert some further questions to address the queries you have or to hold a conference with the expert (and any other experts instructed in your case) and a barrister to explore the reasons for the expert’s view.

Sometimes, clients find that, once their treatment has been comprehensively reviewed by an expert, even if the expert is unsupportive, they understand the reasons for this and are able to accept that their potential claim has been fully investigated but that a court would be unlikely to find in their favour. This alone can help to provide some closure.

Sometimes clients are unsatisfied with the expert’s performance and feel that the expert has not fully considered all of the aspects of their treatment or they simply want a second opinion. Depending on how the case is funded, it may be possible to obtain funding for this. More often than not though, it will be necessary for the client to fund the second opinion themselves. If the claim is ultimately successful, the cost of this can be recovered from the Defendant. If the claim is unsuccessful, the cost cannot be recovered.

If the second report is supportive, the claim may subsequently proceed on the basis of the second expert’s view and can still ultimately be successful.