
BEST PRACTICE SPONSOR 2020
27EXPERT IN MIND |
Young Achiever Award at the Personal
Injury Awards in December 2019.
The team are actively involved in charity
events and this year alone they have
raised nearly £4,000 for Guide Dogs for
the Blind, Access to Justice and Cancer
Research by taking part in events such as
half marathons, charity tea parties and
the ten-kilometre London legalwalk.
Adapting to financial cutbacks
In 2014, severe cuts were made to
legal aid which meant that expert fees
were almost halved overnight. Initially,
as a result, case instructions reduced
dramatically and unfortunately it meant
that a number of valued experts did not
continue in this field.
For us, this brought a period of great
adjustment and sadly resulted in several
redundancies and an office downsize.
Fees are now lower than ever, and yet
high-quality experts are still required for
their valuableopinions.
Of course, the cuts and the continued
scrutiny of the Legal Aid Agency have
had major effects on legal firms, with
several smaller businesses closing. The
LAA are taking an increasing amount of
time to settle invoices and are then often
disputing the figures, meaning legal firms,
and companies like ours, are having to
spend valuable time trawling through old
files to justify costs. These delays mean
that money that is received from the
LAA is being used by legal firms to cover
running costs and staff salaries rather than
being passed on to settle outstanding
invoices. From our perspective, this can
mean that invoices are not settled for
lengthy periods, and increasingly are
never settled, as more firms have no
choice but to go intoliquidation.
In extreme cases, we have issued legal
proceedings against a solicitor where a
large sum of money is owed and despite
having been to court on numerous
occasions, no payment has been received.
For a small business this is incredibly
costly, and it seems unbelievable that
there is no safeguard that avoids such
expensive, repetitive court attendances
with no resolutionforthcoming.
The intricacies of GDPR
The introduction of GDPR in 2018 has
brought both positive and negative
effects. While it is beneficial to have
guidelines, especially those which
protect the privacy of individuals and
their personal data, there are many
ambiguous areas. We have had several
cases where a parent who has been the
subject of a mental health assessment in
a family proceedings case contacts us for
copies of the notes and documents that
an expert has seen in relation to the case
and to their children. If it is the case that
the child has not had contact with this
parent for some time, it is a very grey
area as to whether the parent should be
allowed sight of suchdocuments.
However, neither the ICO nor our legal
advisors have definitive answers for
specific cases such as these, which can
be upsetting for the person wanting to
obtain the information, and frustrating
for us as a company with the risk of
breaching GDPR. It would help greatly
if there were a go-to for these complex
situations that have arisen as a result of
the introduction of GDPR.
Going forward, we plan to continue
our expansion, gradually, to maintain
the high calibre of experts by hand
picking new additions to our panel, and
to ensure that we never compromise
the personal service for which we
arerenowned.
The Expert in Mind
team’s motto is
“teamwork makes
the dream work”
We have a
common goal:
to ensure a
professional,
efficient and
personal
service to our
clients and our
experts
“
“