Expert Witness Features – page 38

Cultural, religious and ethnic issues in gynaecology litigation

IN MY FIRST case, in June 1992, a Pakistani Muslim woman, aged 21, accused an English gynaecologist of removing her entire reproductive system without her consent, and that the operation caused her great loss in life.

She had signed a consent form for laparatomy, and her mother was with her at the time of the operation. However, a High Court judge ruled that the gynaecologist was not negligent when he tragically mistook an endometriosis mass as a spreading ovarian cancer.

My report on the case included the following cultural, religious and ethnic issues.

Expert testimony is part of the service

An expert witness service is one of the range of services supplied by User Friendly Psychiatry Ltd (UFP), a mental health consultancy managed and led by registered mental health nurse and psychotherapist Caroline Williams. UFP provides training, corporate services and cognitive behaviour psychotherapy (CBT).

UFP’s mental health nursing expert witness service is provided by Caroline herself. She is a registered mental health nurse with additional skills and qualifications at both undergraduate and post-graduate levels in cognitive behaviour therapy, management and clinical teaching. She is also a teaching Fellow at the University of Manchester and has years of experience working for the NHS. Caroline is a trained expert witness and has completed the Bond Solon expert witness CUBS programme. She is also on the Royal College of Nursing expert witness database.

Complex loss of earnings claims – where to start

THE ESSENTIAL TASKS in assessing loss of earnings are to determine:

Actual post accident earnings
Likely future earnings
The level of earnings that it appears the claimant would have enjoyed but for the accident.

This involves understanding the claimant’s sources of pre and post accident income, how profitable these were and what was required to achieve these levels of profitability.

‘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.