Make sure your fees reflect your expertise

BMA Medico-legal Conference

Doctors doing expert witness work should make sure their fees reflect their expertise, according to consultant neurologist Mr Michael Gross, of the Neurology Clinic.

He advised the BMA conference audience to take on this sort of work only if they enjoyed the heat of combat.

They needed to be resilient and to be successful they had to remember the slogan ‘preparation, preparation, preparation’.

Giving a host of tips in a talk about cross-examination, he warned that barristers were paid to make expert witness doctors look less than competent. But the more aggressive the questioning, the more points the expert witness would be scoring.