Chris Makin’s Recent Blog Posts
Do You Really Need A Forensic Accountant?
It is said you can see the rubbish on the beach only when the tide goes out. Similarly, much financial crime is discovered only when a company’s funds have run out. And in these straitened times, financial crime is more prevalent. Where normal income dries up, the impecunious but honest individual may ask himself: Who […]
How Can You Really Be Heard?
It is only natural for people to want to be heard, and that is particularly true when they have a dispute. We all know about people having disputes, personal as well as in business. It’s always the same; we are certain the other side doesn’t care to listen to our well-reasoned arguments, to our cool […]
Two More Reasons To Mediate
With the constant demand for my services as a forensic accountant and expert witness, in a wide variety of cases from High Court commercial cases through judicial review and arbitration to family matters and the occasional criminal case, one may think that litigation trundles on in the same way as before Lord Woolf’s Access to […]
Has Your Expert Still Not Been In The Hot Tub Yet?
We in the litigation industry have talked for some time about hot tubbing, an idea which Lord Justice Jackson hoped we might adopt. In fact, the first blog I posted in 2012 on what was then my new website was on this very subject. It even included a picture of me and a couple of young […]
So Who Needs A Specialist Mediator?
I have been a forensic accountant and expert witness now for 30 years, and have written hundreds of reports and given expert evidence scores of times across a very wide range of subjects: commercial disputes, director and partnership disputes, matrimonial valuations, personal injury and fatal accident on the civil side; fraud, asset tracing, drug trafficking, […]
Is Your Expert Dual Qualified?
…or, like the car in the picture, will your case come a cropper when your expert “struts his stuff” at trial? In the old days, a reasonably competent chartered accountant could feel quite comfortable giving expert evidence at trial, without special training, and without feeling that one needed to be a member of that exalted […]
Is This The Worst Expert Witness Ever?
CPR 35 and the family and criminal equivalents are quite clear: the expert has an overriding duty to the court, irrespective of who instructs them or by whom they are paid. That seems quite straightforward, and the vast majority of experts (including me, I fervently hope!) are very careful to meet such requirements. But for […]
The Sturm Und Drang Of Partnerships
“Partnership is the relation which subsists between persons carrying on a business in common with a view of profit.” – Partnership Act 1890, Section 1(1). Sounds easy, doesn’t it? A group of like-minded people putting all their skills and enthusiasms into running an enterprise – a legal practice, say – and sharing the fruits of […]
Is Tax Planning Unethical?
In light of the efforts by HMRC to increase the tax take, and in light of attempts by politicians to blur the boundaries between tax avoidance (permissible, if sometimes anti-social) and tax evasion (very naughty, criminal, dangerous, and downright greedy) I am reminded of the “shovel in the stores” judgement of Lord Clyde, Lord President […]
Do You Need An Expert In Hot Tubs?
Silly question, I know, but you more alert litigators will recognise that I’m talking about concurrent evidence. Now, you may think “hot-tubbing” means having a couple of experts in a Jacuzzi, or being boiled alive in a missionary pot. Not so; but either way, it’s likely to make your experts sweat unless they are very […]