Welcome to the High Court and have a nice day

I have just spent the past two and a half days in the High Court; not as a cleaner or a criminal, but as an expert witness. I have provided evidence in Court before, but not the High Court; this was just a job that just happened to be in the High Court – not a bother.

As an expert witness, you represent the Court, you don’t have a side and therefore there is no need for either side to attack you – you have to accept that you are a player in someone else’s game, but it is what it is.  Expert witnesses are there to explain the facts and provide explanation, it should be very clinical and nothing personal.  Going into the trial I wasn’t too fussed; I was confident that I knew more about trees than various legal teams. I had created a Brief of Evidence that I felt comfortable enough with – it wasn’t great, but I felt I could defend it.

It should have been apparent that something was different about this game as soon as the legal teams donned Grim Reaper outfits complete with tiny hoods attached to the left shoulder. I watched as the Judge and Council bowed to each other – or more so, when the Judge bowed they all bowed back… I may have known more about trees than they did, but there weren’t any trees in the courtroom.

After the case was presented, witnesses took The Stand and the questioning began. From where I sat, I was becoming increasingly annoyed; the barrister wasn’t really asking questions at all, he was offering up statements and asking the witness to agree with him. Yes, going by the letter of the law, he was asking questions – we were after all, in the very place where the letter of the law should be applied. If someone didn’t agree or provided an alternate answer, the barrister would simply reword the same statement, or break it down to its component parts. Point by point, line by line, an agreement was required, and because you had agreed to this, by default you had agreed with that. Interspersed with these requests to agree, the barrister would have the witnesses turn to page this or that, in one document or another other, or in volume A, B or C of the agreed bundle. Once the page was found, the witness would be asked to agree that the said page was, in fact, the said page, and then the barrister would roll on. I was finding all of this agreement, rather disagreeable.

I was the fifth witness to take The Stand. I had just watched my colleague, or should I say ‘my learned friend’ be grilled on his arboricultural evidence for two solid hours – he was cool and calm and very much the professional. When I got to the stand I was well and truly pumped. While reading my evidence aloud, I had gained the clarity of a savant – simultaneously I was able to see all possible questions and craft multiple answers to each of them, I was spotting lines that could be interpreted in ways that were not as I had intended and I was working out ways counter these. I was functioning in some parallel time frame, I was on fire. But, of course, nobody else but me knew that I was operating on a higher plane, nobody else could sense my processing speed, the only outward sign of my heightened state was my complete lack of ability to read aloud. Those listening would have been forgiven for thinking that I was nervous, the fact that I had already thought of this and had already forgiven them didn’t change the fact that I was on fire, and I was burning.

Once the statements that I was required to agree with began to flow, I said no – I knew that I was going to say no, even before the statement was put to me. Not only did I know that I was going to say no to the barrister’s question, but I had already worked out what the next three questions were going to be and I had already said no to them. This, of course, was not good – this not the role or function of an expert witness. Added to this, I was only successfully predicting about 25% of the questions, the other 75% came from left field – I found myself saying no to things that I wasn’t even sure I disagreed with. At some point, I decided that if the barrister stopped asking me to agree with him, I would have gained the upper hand – although what I was going to do with this upper hand I did not know... And then it was over, I had been positioned and the next player was called.

Less than an hour later we were in a pub with a pint in hand; we found ourselves gasping for breath more so than licking our wounds – I cannot recall that last time I was so mentally drained. I loved it – up the creek, in the deep-end without a paddle… welcome to the High Court and have a nice day.