Chris Makin’s Blog Posts about ‘Litigation’
Family Matters
Accountants are into everything, aren’t they? And that is especially true when things go wrong. In these blogs you will have read (I hope) about how an accountant can act as expert in commercial litigation, can act as mediator in commercial disputes and much else besides, can investigate fraud, and can trace and quantify the […]
Choose your expert with care!
Sign seen in a Boston Mass shoe repairer’s window: “Fast Service – High Quality – Low Price – choose any two.” Is that how you choose your experts? I sincerely hope not! Here are my thoughts and suggestions, as a hard-bitten expert of 30 years’ experience. I am a chartered accountant so the slant will […]
Understanding business accounts – what to look out for
Lawyers are good with words, and accountants are good with figures. What a pity they don’t talk the same language! Now meet an accountant who is good with words – I have to be, as an experienced expert witness – which means that I must be weak with figures. True? Not really! It’s a pity […]
Give us the tools…
…and we will do the job. In this case, the job is to value a holding of shares in a private company, and the tools are the details about the company which the valuer needs to be able to perform such valuation. A recent High Court (Chancery) decision should be helpful. The case is Cosmetic […]
How to get best value out of your expert
I have gone on alarmingly in the legal press about forensic accountancy, mediation and even expert determination. Perhaps it is time to talk about experts generally, and about how you litigators can use them to get best value for the benefit of your clients – and your own reputation. The first point to consider is […]
But for the Accident…
…and some pitfalls to avoid. Liability and causation are matters for lawyers, but there is then the problem of what a claimant could be expected to have earned but for the RTA, the clinical negligence, or the criminally inflicted injury. Early editions of Kemp & Kemp had a chapter on how to calculate the employed […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]