The Legal Expert Witness
I grew up on legal dramas and always assumed that I would be an expert witness as an adult. In so many of the dramas, the expert court witnesses made the final difference in outcome of the case. Sometimes they would come up with the most fantastically difficult and obscure deductions, confounding both defense and prosecution by adding that one crucial piece of evidence. Although your typical expert court witness on TV was a villain as often as a hero, when he was heroic, he was impressive to behold.
I didn’t end up being an expert witness, but I did grow up to be a lawyer. I suppose the reason was that as a kid, I didn’t know what kind of expertise I wanted to have. There are expert witnesses in pretty much any field. There are, of course, medical witnesses, psychiatrists, and forensic experts, but there are also people with more obscure areas of expertise. In one case, I even hired an expert handwriting witness to help prove that my client couldn’t have written a particular forged check.
The one thing that has consistently struck me since becoming a lawyer is that the courtroom isn’t nearly as a dramatic a place as you would think. Sure there is a lot at stake, but for the most part the action is rather prosaic. An expert witness won’t shake a case because, for every expert for the prosecution, there is likely to be one for the defense, and vice versa.
The key is to have better spoken experts to play more flawlessly into your legal strategy than your opponents experts to into his. Not every expert witness is a highly well-known, highly respected figure in his or her field, but they do all have certain things in common. Most professional experts are extremely good speakers, eager to hire out their testimony for a substantial fee.
They are well versed in the art of working with legal counsel to examine the case in detail and give effective testimony. They also know how to say no when they can’t in good conscience represent one side’s position against the other. All in all, a good expert witness has to be an expert in the art of speaking as much as in a particular area of science. No matter how knowledgeable an expert is otherwise, he won’t be able to win a case if he can’t make his point heard.
Published by: charlie reese on February 24th, 2009 | Filed under Legal
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