The Civil Justice Council (CJC) has published updated guidelines for instructing experts. The guide is designed to ensure lawyers, litigants and experts follow best practice and comply with court orders and Pt 35 of the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR), which covers experts and assessors.
The guidelines include a reference to “hot-tubbing” introduced as part of the Jackson reforms, recommending that experts need to be told in advance of the trial if the court has made an order for concurrent evidence. Since April 2013 the court has had the power to order that experts of like disciplines give their evidence at trial concurrently, not sequentially. The experts are then questioned together, firstly by the judge based upon disagreements in the joint statement, and then by the parties’ advocates.
The CJC is an advisory public body established under the Civil Procedure Act 1997 with responsibility for overseeing the modernisation of the civil justice system.
The new guidelines are due to come into force in the autumn when the current protocol on instructing experts in civil claims is expected to be removed.
