Concurrent evidence: what’s the next step? asks David Dabbs
Among the world’s common law jurisdictions this country is considered one of the leaders in the procedural reform of expert testimony. It was not always so.
Before Cresswell J’s decision in The Ikarian Reefer (1993), courts were increasingly concerned that experts were becoming advocates for their opinions, acting more as a member of the litigation team than as objective contributors to the resolution of technical issues.
It was out of concern for the impact of adversarial bias that Part 35 of the Civil Procedure Rules declared that the expert’s underlying duty is to the court, irrespective of who called the expert. The party’s witness became the court’s witness.
In Australia, procedural reformists have taken up the baton and left us behind: “hot-tubbing”—or, to use the formal descriptive, the concurrent testimony of expert witnesses—was established there in 2005, and might be the Next Big Thing here. What is it, what does it do—and do we really need it?
Concurrent Evidence enables expert witnesses from similar
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