Featured Articles – Expert Witness Features – page 36

‘Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start’

WHEN SOMEONE puts words to a well known song in your head you can’t stop singing them but when it comes to a financial services claim, ‘Let’s start at the very beginning’, is the only place to start.

This may sound perfectly logical but I receive many claim enquiries that only detail the loss scenarios, such as when it all went wrong. Yet, when making a claim against a financial advisor, bank, investment bank, etc., (or ‘firms’, using the FSA term), for any financial services claim it is essential to review all the history, and go right back to the beginning.

Proceeds of crime or legitimate funds?

Money laundering offences arise under Part 7 of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA). The legislation is thus relatively new, although earlier offences arose in relation to drug offences. While a comparatively new law in the UK, some of the forensic accounting methods used in investigations go back much further.

I have over the years worked on several hundred large divorce cases, including a number making double page-spreads or the front pages of national newspapers. The forensic accounting techniques, therefore, go back several decades before POCA.

Possession: nine points of the law?

More and more frequently, solicitors are taking defence instructions where the prosecution evidence is computer based. It is often the case that a solicitor will engage an expert with only the vaguest notion of what the expert’s instructions should be. I have even, in the past, been asked to help draft my own instructions!

Specialist training needed for forensics

The Faculty of Forensic and Legal Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians was inaugurated in 2006 with two main aims:

To promote for the public benefit the advancement of education and knowledge in the field of forensic and legal medicine. To develop and maintain for the public benefit the good practice of forensic and legal medicine by ensuring the highest professional standards of competence and ethical integrity.
To establish a training pathway in forensic and legal medicine and achieve specialist recognition of the specialty. To act as an authoritative body for the purpose of consultation in matters of educational or public interest concerning forensic and legal medicine.

Babies need to be attached

Attachment theory is very simple: it just describes the outcome of a mother’s and baby’s interactions.

Baby cries; mum acts. It is a perfect relationship for baby – if mum is able to recognise and respond to baby’s needs. This tiny sequence, which is so commonplace that it has become almost unnoticeable, is repeated possibly 10 times a day in the first couple of years of a baby’s life. That adds up to over 7,000 repetitions.