The more you understand about the judicial thought processes, the more valuable, I am sure, will be your contribution to the outcome of individual cases. (Wall, 2007, p. xvii)

Maintaining and developing expertise

If you want to maintain and develop your role as a psychiatric expert, you will have to keep up to date. It should go without saying that this means not just keeping up to date and fit to practise as a psychiatrist but also as a doctor, including being proficient in cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Court users in Bradford, and not least a particular judge, are likely to remember Dr Ray Travers, not for his expert psychiatric evidence in a murder trial, but for his athletic response and clinical skill, when he rendered assistance after the judge collapsed to the floor.

The following are just a few suggestions.

Maintaining clinical practice

It is important to maintain your clinical practice. Medico-legal work used to be what consultants did when they retired. Heed what Moses LJ said in Henderson:

The fact that an expert is in clinical practice at the time he makes his report is of significance. Clinical practice affords experts the opportunity to maintain and develop their experience. Such experts acquire experience which continues and develops. Their continuing observation, the experience of both the foreseen and unforeseen, the recognised and the unrecognised, form a powerful basis for their opinion. Clinicians learn from each case in which they are engaged. Each case makes them think and as their experience develops so does their understanding. Continuing experience gives them the opportunity to adjust previously held opinions, to alter their views. They are best placed to recognise that that which is unknown one day may be acknowledged the next. Such clinical experience … may provide a far more reliable source of evidence than that provided by those who have ceased to practise their expertise in a continuing clinical setting and have retired from such practice. … They have lost the opportunity, day by day to learn and develop from continuing experience.