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or comprehensive guide to the courts in the form of a professional register of accreditation to which they or parties may have recourse when considering the suitability of proposed expert witnesses.”

He had proposed a merger of the various bodies in existence as for e.g. The Forensic Science Society and the Academy of Experts and many others who came into existence more recently. However the various Expert groups resisted this. Had this merger gone ahead, it would perhaps have been easier for the courts to refer an incompetent expert so that he can be taken off the register of expert witnesses, without losing the privilege of working professionally as a doctor, since a competent professional may not always make a competent expert witness. This would be a deterrent against conscious bias.

Experts are prohibited from Conditional Fee Agreements (CFA) in order to avoid comprising their overriding duty to the courts and to justice and to eliminate a potential source of financial bias. Using a SJE does not make a difference from this particular aspect of financial bias since even in the case of multiple experts, as there is no additional financial initiative.

One advantage of a SJE is that there is less likelihood of suppression of an expert report [21] that is favourable to any one of the parties, whilst this could sometimes occur as an unconscious bias due to some degree of loyalty felt by the expert (‘hired gun syndrome’)in an adversarial system.

Conclusion

The increasing use of expert evidence leads to increasing reliance on their objectivity and admissibility. Assuming that the experts are competent in their field, it is imperative to avoid bias in their evidence. One of the reasons believed to be the source of bias is the loyalty that creeps in towards the party that hires the expert (the ‘hired gun syndrome’).

Lord Woolf’s proposal for a Single Joint Expert was believed to be one possible solution, at least from the point of view of financial bias, though the main reason for this suggestion was to reduce the costs of litigation. The SJE would certainly be useful in certain instances, for example, where the parties have widely different resources (to level the playing field), where the duration of the case should be reduced (fast tracking in cases where the claims are expected to be less than ￡15,000) and where the field of expertise is narrow and well established, such that there is no need for a range of experts to give evidence.

However, the dangers could be that the expert could be thrust upon an unwilling party (since the courts can decide where there is no agreement) and also that in cases of an advancing scientific field (fringe science) as for example nanotechnology and forensic science, it might be that the SJE could lean one way or another, thereby failing to consider viable alternatives. It could also mean that cross examining could be a problem since the SJE is rarely required to give oral evidence, as would the loss of litigation privilege.

In complex cases, there is bound to be the need for more than one expert and also for the moment, in criminal cases, it is once again necessary to have different experts since the litigation privilege applies. Lord Auld LJ [22] mentions a survey where about 40% of civil case had used the SJE. So there does seem a place for this method, but in a limited