Tag Archives: letter of instruction

Letters of Destruction

Posted on February 1, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

 

You may well have heard that the new guidance on the instruction of experts came into force today.  If it is actually enforced, it will significantly reduce the number of experts and at the same time significantly increase the amount of preparatory work prior to requesting the involvement of an expert.

 

The Ministry of Justice published a jolly and triumphal press release about it, here

 

http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/media/media-releases/2013/tighter-rules-introduced-on-expert-evidence-family-cases

 

“New rules come into force today which will mean judges can streamline proceedings in family courts by reducing the number of expert witnesses who have to give evidence.

Up to now, evidence from experts including psychologists, doctors and others would be heard if it was “reasonably required”. Now the judge will apply a tougher test and only allow the evidence if it is “necessary”.

The President of the Family Division, Sir James Munby, said:

“There is no question of families being denied the chance to call evidence they need to support their case or being denied a fair hearing. But the new test gives judges more control over expert evidence in family proceedings. The rule change gives family judges the means to make robust case management decisions to make sure the expert evidence is focused and relevant.”

“ This change underlines the key role of the court in determining what expert evidence it requires to help it reach the decisions in a case.

“This change is a vital component of the active judicial case management that will be needed to prepare the ground for the new Single Family Court, due to come into being in April 2014.”

The rules substitute a new Part 25 (Experts and Assessors) into the Family Procedure Rules and will apply to existing proceedings as well as those started after today’s date.

In addition, controlling the use of expert evidence has been added to Rule 1.4 of the Family Procedure Rules governing active case management.

The key changes to the existing Part 25 include:

  • a change to the test for permission to put expert evidence before the court from ‘reasonably required’ to ‘necessary’.
  • a list of factors to which the court is to have regard in reaching a decision whether to give permission, including the impact on the timetable and conduct of the proceedings and the cost of the expert evidence. Additional factors are specified in proceedings involving children. These include what other expert evidence is available, including any obtained before the start of proceedings, and whether the evidence could be obtained from another source, such as one of the parties or professionals already involved in the case;
  • in proceedings involving children, an application for permission to instruct an expert should state the questions which the expert is required to answer and, where permission is granted, the court will give directions specifying the questions that are to be put to the expert.”

 

 

I was interested in the very last bit  – the Court approving the questions and setting them out in the order approving the instruction, because I wasn’t entirely sure that this claim was actually delivered in the changes, so have pressed a little further, and found that it IS, if the practice direction is followed  (yeah, right) :-

 

 

http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/Resources/JCO/Documents/Practice%20Directions/family-div-procedure-rules-2010-practice-directions-amendments-consolidated-04122012.pdf 

 

 

 

Well, it does seem, that if the Practice Direction is followed (ha!)  then rather than coming to Court with a name of an expert and some timescales, there should be a proper application, accompanied by a draft order [my underlining]

 

3.11 FPR 25.7(2)(b) provides that a draft of the order giving the court’s permission as mentioned in FPR 25.4 is to be attached to the application for the court’s permission. That draft order must set out the following matters—

a) the issues in the proceedings to which the expert evidence is to relate and which the court is to identify; b) the questions relating to the issues in the case which the expert is to answer and which the court is to approve ensuring that they

(i) are within the ambit of the expert’s area of expertise;

(ii) do not contain unnecessary or irrelevant detail;

 

(iii) are kept to a manageable number and are clear, focused and direct; c) the party who is responsible for drafting the letter of instruction and providing

the documents to the expert; d) the timetable within which the report is to be prepared, filed and served; e) the disclosure of the report to the parties and to any other expert; f) the organisation of, preparation for and conduct of any experts’ discussion

(see Practice Direction 25E – Discussions between Experts in Family Proceedings); g) the preparation of a statement of agreement and disagreement by the experts following an experts’ discussion; h) making available to the court at an early opportunity the expert reports in electronic form;

i)                    the attendance of the expert at court to give oral evidence (alternatively, the expert giving his or her evidence in writing or remotely by video link), whether at or for the Final Hearing or another hearing; unless agreement about the opinions given by the expert is reached at or before the Issues Resolution Hearing (“IRH”) or, if no IRH is to be held, by a date specified by the court prior to the hearing at which the expert is to give oral evidence

 

 

 

 

And then also, it appear that the party seeking the instruction should send the draft order and questions in to the Court in advance of the hearing

 

Asking the court to settle the letter of instruction to a single joint expert

6.1 Where possible, the written request for the court to consider the letter of instruction referred to in rule 25.12(2) should be set out in an e-mail to the court and copied by e-mail to the other instructing parties. The request should be sent to the relevant court or (by prior arrangement only) directly to the judge dealing with the proceedings. In the magistrates’ court, the request should be sent to the relevant court or (by prior arrangement only) to any district judge (magistrates’ courts ) hearing the proceedings (and copied to the legal adviser) or to the legal adviser. The court will settle the letter of instruction, usually without a hearing to avoid delay; and will send (where practicable, by e-mail) the settled letter to the lead solicitor for transmission forthwith to the expert, and copy it to the other instructing parties for information.

 

 

 

 

Well, my first cynical take on this is that this simply won’t happen. There’s quite a lot of this that was already in the Practice Direction on Experts which everyone cheerfully ignored. It is that traditional Practice Direction stance of rather than making two or three solid suggestions that everyone can follow, that you introduce a blizzard of utterly unworkable schemes all at once to the point where everyone takes one look at it and concludes that it is best to just pretend the whole thing doesn’t exist.

 

If it IS going to happen, and that the Judge refuses any expert assessment where the request is not Practice Direction compliant  [and that really depends on whether they are being sternly told behind the scenes that this is what they must do], then we are going to end up with an awful lot of adjourned CMCs, where we have to come back to Court and do it all again, only this time with reams of paperwork.

 [If a party seeks an expert assessment, and doesn’t come with all of the paperwork and the CMC has to be adjourned, are they at risk of costs orders? Yet another reason for ducking being the lead on any assessment or proposed assessment] 

If it IS going to happen, two major practice points arise. Firstly, the advocates meeting before the CMC would need to be happening much earlier than the two working days prior that it currently is  (which in reality will just mean a later CMC).  Secondly, whichever of the two parents lawyers decides to be the lead on the instruction of an expert, is going to have a huge amount of work in organising that instruction, far far more than at present, and their profitability (ha!) in the case probably immediately goes down the Swanee river.

 

So, if you are only looking for one expert, expect to see some quarrels at the advocates meeting about whether mother or father’s team should be the lead; as neither of them will really want to take on this burden.  

 

[I also expect that counsel attending these advocates meetings will regularly find in their brief “under no circumstances agree to us being the lead on the expert”   – we squabble about ‘who has to be the lead’ now, when very little is involved, but this is now a massive volume of work]

 

 

This may, cynically, be the way that the Government intend to reduce the number of experts – it hasn’t been possible to get the Courts to refuse assessments  (being that they tend to follow the line of the Court of Appeal, which has been very pro-second-opinion), so they will just make it very very unattractive for those representing parents to actually make the applications.

 

 

So, watch this space for the first appeal from a Court who refuse an expert assessment because this Practice Direction has not been complied with.

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Practice directions make perfect?

Posted on October 5, 2012 by suesspiciousminds

 

Gosh, this is an insanely bloggy week.  Some consultation documents for new family law practice directions have flitted across my inbox today. I read them, so you don’t have to…

 

There are three big ones

 

One on experts pre-proceedings, which is obviously going to become more and more pertinent as the Government move the goalposts to artificially reduce the timescales for Court proceedings , sorry ‘shift the assessment process to pre-proceedings’.   It seems to me eminently sensible – there should be a proper LOI, documents shown to the expert should be particularised, and the expert should be told that they are to treat themselves and the assessment in exactly the same way as if it were being done within proceedings. 

 

 

One on the Official Solicitor, which is jawdropping.

 

1.1             The court will investigate as soon as possible any issue as to whether an adult party or intended party to family proceedings lacks capacity (within the meaning of the Mental Capacity Act 2005) to conduct the proceedings. An adult who lacks capacity to act as a party to the proceedings is a protected party and must have a litigation friend to conduct the proceedings on their behalf. The expectation of the Official Solicitor is that the Official Solicitor will only be invited to act for the protected party as litigation friend if there is no other person suitable or willing to act.

1.2    Any issue as to the capacity of an adult to conduct the proceedings must be determined before the court gives any directions relevant to that adult’s role in the proceedings.

 

We all know that this has been the direction of travel for the Official Solicitor for some time – they simply can’t cope with the volume of cases that have come their way. But this is a recognition in a Practice Direction that for most cases, a person lacking capacity will have to instruct solicitors through a friend or member of their family.

 

No prospect for difficulties there.  There’s never anything massively sensitive within care proceedings about an adult that might not be appropriate to share with their family member. There’s never any conflict between family members and any shifting allegiances or falling out. And there’s never any conflict of interest between say a mother who wants to fight for her child, and the grandmother who is now instructing the mother’s representatives but who actually wants the child to live with her (grandmother) rather than the mother.

 

I can see that in some quarters, John Hemming MP for one, it might be thought desirable to take the Official Solicitor out of the picture, and have the family help the parent to give instructions to a solicitor, rather than have some remote figure of the State make those decisions.  I have some sympathy with that, and think that it is a perfectly legitimate subject for debate and if it is after scrutiny found to be BETTER to have the family do it than the State, then make the change.

 

 But what’s happening here is a dramatic shift in public policy from “where a person is incapable of instructing a solicitor, someone independent should represent their best interests” to  “anyone suitable in the family can instruct a solicitor on the parents behalf”,   not as a result of debate, or research, or analysis, but because the current workload is too much.

 

Just as we massively scaled down the role of Guardians because CAFCASS was overstretched  (and look what that did – ushered in an era of getting three or four experts on every case, delaying and obfuscating and costing the country), we’re making the same error here.  Instead of properly resourcing the Official Solicitor, we’re just abandoning the principle.

 

 

I am mystified as to what a parent’s representative is supposed to do, faced with a capacity certificate saying the parent can’t give instructions, and two competing people who want to be the litigation friend.  The solicitor can’t chose, the client can’t chose. How do you resolve that?  What if the papers you’ve seen show that the person being put forward as the litigation friend failed to protect the client as a child and is largely responsible for the mess the client now finds themselves in as an adult?

 

 

 

The third one is on the instruction of experts within proceedings. Everyone follows the current practice direction on experts slavishly, as we know, so a fresh one is bound to fix any problems.

 

Here’s the gist of it – try to go for single jointly agreed experts rather than going off to get one each, as if we were in 1980s civil litigation.

 

 Well, we already do. Ah, but now they have an acronym  SJE  (Single Joint Expert) so that is going to make all the difference.

 

The Practice Direction does clarify that telling a prospective expert something at all about the case so that they can (a) tell you whether it is the sort of thing they can do (b) when they can do it by and (c) how much they would like to be paid for it, knowing full well that the estimate they give is subject to the whim of the LSC, is definitely not a contempt of Court.

 

[That is of course, helpful – but given that the Practice Direction is not in force yet, raises the unfortunate spectre that if it is necessary to have a change in law to make sure that doing that WON’T be a contempt of court in the future, that it sort of is now?]

 

And then what will be necessary in the application for an expert – underlining is mine.

 

an application or the court’s permission to call an expert or put in evidence an expert’s report, for an expert to be instructed or for the child to be medically or psychiatrically examined or otherwise assessed for the purpose of obtaining expert evidence for use in the proceedings must state-—

(a)    the discipline, qualifications and expertise of the expert (by way of C.V. where possible);

(b)    the expert’s availability to undertake the work;

(c)     the timetable for the report;

(d)    the responsibility for instruction;

(e)    whether the expert evidence can properly be obtained by only one party (for example, on behalf of the child);

(f)      why the expert evidence proposed cannot properlybe given by an officer of the service, Welsh family proceedings officer  or the local authority (social services undertaking a core assessment) in accordance with their respective statutory duties or any other party to the proceedings or an expert already instructed in the proceedings;

(g)    the likely cost of the report on an hourly or other charging basis;

(h)    the proposed apportionment (at least in the first instance) of any jointly instructed expert’s fee; when it is to be paid;  and, if applicable, whether public funding has been approved.

 

 

And then what is to go into the order – note that it is going to be necessary to append the questions so that the Court can determine that they are kept to a manageable number and are clear and focussed.  That’s good news for solicitors, since it means an end to the interminable tedium of back and forth emailing about questions and the questions being settled by counsel at Court.

 

I think that this is a GOOD thing.  It will mean that CMC’s will take substantially more court time than previously, as the questions will have to be drafted before an order can be lodged.

 

The terms of the draft order to be attached to the application for the court’s permission

3.8    FPR 25.7 provides that a draft of the order giving the court’s permission mentioned in FPR 25.4 is to be attached to the application for the court’s permission. That draft order must set out the following matters—

a)      the issues in the proceedings to which the expert evidence is to relate and which the court is to identify;

b)      the questions relating to the issues in the case which the expert is to answer and which the court is to approve ensuring that they

(i) are within the ambit of the expert’s area of expertise;

(ii) do not contain unnecessary or irrelevant detail;

(iii) are kept to a manageable number and are clear, focused and direct;

c)      the party who is responsible for drafting the letter of instruction and providing the documents to the expert;

d)      the timetable within which the report is to be prepared, filed and served;

e)      the disclosure of the report to the parties and to any other expert;

f)       the organisation of, preparation for and conduct of any experts’ discussion (see Practice Direction 25E – Discussions between Experts in Family Proceedings);

g)      the preparation of a statement of agreement and disagreement by the experts following an experts’ discussion;

h)      making available to the court at an early opportunity the expert reports in electronic form;

i)        the attendance of the expert at court to give oral evidence (alternatively, the expert giving his or her evidence in writing or remotely by video link), whether at or for the Final Hearing or another hearing; unless agreement about the opinions given by the expert is reached at or before the Issues Resolution Hearing (“IRH”) or, if no IRH is to be held, by a date specified by the court prior to the hearing at which the expert is to give oral evidence.

 

 

 

I think the two on experts are fine, and the one on the representation of vulnerable adults who lack capacity is awful.

 

It looks as though the plan is for these Practice Directions to come in some time before the end of this year. Sadly, the consultation process is over before I ever saw the documents, such is life. I doubt my snarky mutterings would have made any difference anyway.

 

And in the words of Meat Loaf – two out of three ain’t bad.

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Mis-practice direction – how not to write a letter of instruction

Posted on September 10, 2012 by suesspiciousminds

It has been plain to me for a number of years that alongside the official Practice Direction on Instructing Experts http://www.familylaw.co.uk/system/uploads/attachments/0001/8873/FPR_PD25A.pdf

there must also be a secret set of rules to follow when constructing a letter of instruction that goes to at least half of the parties, in order to produce the monstrosities that we end up with,  but which is not otherwise available.

[Just like the secret special snooker words to Lady in Red…  “a cut as thin as a thong”]

After exhaustive digging and research, and aided by Indiana Jones, Batman the world’s greatest detective,  the Famous Five, Nicholas Cage’s character in that National Treasure film, and Chunk out of the Goonies, I have found it, and here it is.  Unselfishly, I am prepared to share it, so that we all understand how those masterful LOIs really come into being.

Now we all know…

Constructing a Letter of Instruction in Family Proceedings –

a Mis-Practice Direction

1. Make it long. If you’ve asked less than twelve questions, you are doing it wrong. If less than fifteen, you’re still a bit of a lightweight, frankly. Heck, I could do seven questions in a Letter of Instruction just asking for a DNA test, what’s wrong with you? Are you even trying?

2. Ensure that you have at least two nested questions, ideally with six or seven sub-clauses in each. Then you can confidently say that ‘well, we only added two questions’ and get fourteen different things asked

3. If there is a bush, make sure to beat around it.

4. On no account ask a straight question. If you ask a straight question (like, for example “can the parent provide this child with good enough care, now or in the next six months?” ) the expert might give a straight answer, and then where would we all be? Think of the poor mug who has to cross-examine the expert if there’s a straight question and a straight answer. The purpose of the Letter of Instruction is to obfuscate, not illuminate, and to ensure that you get a report which has something for everyone, rather than one clear conclusion.  Your role model here should be Sir Humphrey Appleby.

5. Don’t be afraid to ask the same question again, by subtly changing the words and having it two or three questions further down. If the expert answers them both the same, then you shrug and say “oh well”, but if there are two different items, well, then you have inconsistency, and have topics for cross-examination.

6. If you do encounter a bush, it is essential that you beat around it.

7. Make sure you put at least one question in that is outside the expert’s area. For example, when dealing with a psychiatrist ask them about the mother’s parenting ability or the quality of contact. If an independent social worker, ask them about post traumatic stress disorder. If they give you an answer you like, hooray – if they don’t, you can cross-examine about how they’ve strayed outside their expertise.     [A particular favourite was a draft LOI to a psychologist which contained only questions for a psychiatrist and none on topic. I actually did see this draft]

8. Ensure that the cost section is written at such length and in such impenetrable detail that even a forensic accountant married to a director of the LSC would only have a vague grasp on what is intended. On no account tell the expert the truth, that you don’t know how much they will get paid, or when, and that no amount of chasing or complaining will make the LSC stump up any cash. The cash will simply fall from a branch on the LSC money tree when it is ripe and ready to fall, and not before. You cannot shake that tree.

9. Always try to fundamentally misunderstand attachment theory – a particularly good way is to ask whether the child’s primary attachment is to an adult they don’t live with and haven’t done for over a year, or whether the parent is attached to the child.  In fact, just assume that attachment is in any way relevant to the decision the Court has to take, and you’re half way there.

10. If you have a question for the expert which is really just a rambling theory that you might potentially stick in submissions, but you can put a question mark on the end of it, put it in anyway.  Anything with a ? at the end of it must be a question, by definition. We don’t put ? at the end of long rambling assertions, do we?

11. Feel free to set out in mindbendingly tedious detail, everything that the expert is inevitably going to cover in their assessment, but spell it out for them as if they had never done an assessment before. This couples ideally with the requirement for a nested question.

12. Feel free to ignore the standard of proof that we work towards, and pepper the questions with “is it possible?” “can it be excluded that” or “can we be certain that?” .    In particular, don’t worry that something like Ehler Danloss syndrome affects only one in a hundred thousand people, if it potentially explains the injuries, then the child is bound to have it, and you must insist on the expert testing for it or ruling it out as a possibility. No matter how expensive, time-consuming or intrusive the testing, it has to be done, so that the remote possibility can be excluded.

13. Always end with “and any other matters you consider relevant and important”  because the expert would never, ever, ever tell you something earth-shatteringly important if it didn’t absolutely fall within your already sprawling list of questions.

[If anyone can lay their hands on the fake practice direction, I’m sure written by a judge, which sets out the unwritten laws that people must be following in order to produce  the court bundles that he was seeing – with stuff like “ensure that any individual document is stapled to another document unrelated to it, with a staple that will pierce the fingers of anyone who tries to remove it” , I’d be very grateful and I’ll stick a link to it here, as that was what inspired this]

Thank you to Chunk for his detective work. [Yes, that is just a gratuitous attempt to crowbar in a Goonies picture. You guys! Hey, you guys!]

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