We speak to a consultant Speech and Language Therapist providing assessments for Special Educational Need (SEND) tribunals and writing medicolegal reports for educational negligence and personal injury cases. Here, they tell us more about their Expert Witness work, explains why they find it so meaningful, and how they balance it with their clinical and voluntary commitments.
I’ve been an Expert Witness since 2006.
A contact of mine in London needed someone to write SEND assessments for school children. From there, I established relationships with solicitors and had regular work for several years. After a few years spent working in Australia at a specialist centre for children with autism, I returned to the UK and picked up regular Expert Witness work again.
There wasn’t any EWI training back then!
Back then, the Association of Speech and Language Therapists in Independent Practice (ASLTIP) had a medicolegal special interest group and attending meetings became my early training. A colleague of mine was doing medicolegal reports, but they tended to be really long at the time. Most of my reports were education-based paediatric therapy, so I needed to develop a different style. In 2018 I started my CUBS accredited Expert Witness training with Bond Solon.
I work on personal injury and educational negligence cases.
Most of my medicolegal cases involve brain injury at birth or road traffic accidents. I write both quantum and liability reports. Educational negligence cases involve looking back at the education and support received by relevant services to determine whether the standard was reasonable for the time. The Local Education Authority then pay compensation for not meeting their needs and the client gets the therapy they need as an adult.
I approach my medicolegal and educational cases differently.
With medicolegal cases, I like to do the reading first, then the assessment, and then put it all together. But when I’m seeing a child for a SEND assessment, I like to meet them first without any clouded judgement of their past - because I’m looking at their needs going into the future.
With medicolegal cases, it’s more like detective, investigative work. Put simply, I need to know what has or hasn’t happened in education and then assess skills to see if there is potential to improve in adulthood.
It is not unusual for me to be given 16,000 pages by solicitors!
I don’t need to read them all. That’s the challenging part: working out which I do need to read and what is replicated and repeated. Most firms will send a list of reading and I order those that I think are pertinent – no AI is involved in this process.
My cases normally settle before reaching tribunal or court.
In fact, I’ve never had a medicolegal case end up in court. If I write a good report, it will do the job and a settlement can be agreed upon.
I think using AI to write reports can be very dangerous.
I know of some people who have tried using ChatGPT to write reports. The report it produces is superficial. I think if you're a good Expert Witness, only you have the depth of knowledge and training to address all the key issues (In my case it’s human communication).
I’m not a full time Expert Witness.
I’ve also got a caseload of around ten speech and language therapy clients per week. If I don’t keep up my clinical work, I don’t think I would call myself an Expert Witness because I wouldn’t be up to date with current issues.
I don’t really have a typical day.
My caseload keeps me busy around two and a half days each week and I always keep one day free for Expert Witness work. I might be driving an hour to see clients one morning, doing a tribunal assessment in the afternoon, and writing my notes up in the evening. I write my reports in stages, so it doesn’t seem so daunting.
I do around one Legal Aid case each month.
Fewer and fewer Expert Witnesses are taking on Legal Aid work, because payment takes a very long time. But it’s important to me to keep it up. It’s a way of me giving back, because it’s where I got a lot of clients early on in my Expert Witness career.
I also volunteer as a magistrate.
There’s a lot of training involved, but it’s very interesting to be a part of the criminal justice system as all my Expert Witness work is civil. I also use my professional experience as a magistrate, because I can spot when someone has communication difficulties. I can advise my fellow magistrates to change their language slightly or, if we’re sending someone to trial, I can request special measures.
I enjoy mentoring for the EWI.
I’ve been assessing reports from new EWI members for the past few years. It’s a nice way to give back to the profession and join in with the Expert Witness community.
I want to help children get the therapy interventions they need so they can access and enjoy education.
That’s what has kept me doing Expert Witness work for 20 years. Joint instructions are quite rare in education tribunals: I’m often instructed directly by the parents of children who feel they aren’t getting the speech and language support that their child needs from the Local Education Authority. Parents are always so grateful and I’ve had heartfelt emails saying I’ve made such a difference to their child’s life. That's why I get up and do what I do.
There is a shortage of Speech and Language Therapists.
Some areas don’t have NHS provision at all. A lot of the time, the first time a child is seen by a Speech and Language Therapist is for the tribunal assessment.
There’s a very high levels of non-attenders in speech therapy clinics. If the current NHS funding was put into education, therapists could work in nurseries and schools and there would never be any waste due to non-attenders. Ideally, we want to deal with issues before children leave primary school so they can go and have an enjoyable secondary education.
My advice for new Expert Witnesses is…
Don't write a report and offer to attend court without undertaking training first. You’ll be eaten alive! Access as many courses as you can, especially on report writing. You need some legal knowledge too, so you know where your report's going, the purpose of it, who's going to read it, and how you need to write it - especially now it has been reduced to 15 pages or less for SEND tribunals. The length is actually perfect for me, because I’ve never been one to waffle!