The use of expert witnesses or testimonials is essential to properly litigate a personal injury trial. The reason why an expert opinion is required is because there are three basic types of evidence:
Direct Evidence
This is what the witness saw or experienced themselves, based entirely on the facts they are personally aware of.
Opinion Evidence
When a witness attempts to give their opinion on something this is called opinion evidence, and is not admissible in court. In fact giving your own personal opinion about what transpired during any accident could cause you more legal harm than good.
Expert Evidence
As the name suggests expert evidence is provided by an expert in a field related to the case itself – be it physical, economic or even mechanical expertise being shared. Obviously an expert retained to provide evidence during your personal injury case will need to be properly vetted and their credentials and qualifications thoroughly checked.
So why are expert witnesses so important during a personal injury trial?
Firstly there\’s the issue that most people who\’ve been involved in an accident can\’t always remember every single detail of the accident – possibly due to head trauma. In more unfortunate circumstances however the victim of the accident may have been killed as a result of the accident, or died shortly afterwards, and cannot be present to testify for themselves.
In addition to providing the detail and opinion on your case, which you may not be able to provide yourself, an expert opinion is also critical in evaluating the amount of compensation you might receive. In the example of a person who can no longer work due to an accident inside or outside the workplace an expert economist could be retained to place a monetary value on the victims work in their absence i.e. how much money they would have earned not just now but in the future too – factoring in promotions and pay raises.
Another example would be in the case of an automobile accident where mechanical issues may have been the actual cause of the accident in the first place. In this case auto accident reconstruction experts can be used to recreate the circumstances of the accident, and provide their expert opinion on exactly what was at fault, based on mechanical or other evidence.
Basically an expert witness can either make or break your case, so you should never enter into a complex personal injury claim without being able to rely on expert opinion to supplement your own direct evidence.
It\’s critical that you only engage the services of a law firm which has several years of experience in both vetting and hiring expert witnesses for personal injury cases. As we said earlier testimony from just randomly selected expert witnesses could actually harm your case in the most negative possible ways, so you need to be sure that the expert is qualifi