This year’s Annual Conference discussed AI, independence, credibility, transparency and the changing expectations on expert witnesses.

“If an Expert, a lawyer, an accountant, an engineer, a doctor produce inaccurate or unreliable opinions or use hallucinatory references, they are likely to be liable in negligence, whether they’ve used AI or not.” Sir Geoffrey Vos KG, Master of the Rolls

The Civil Justice Council (‘CJC’) has published an Interim Report and Consultation on the Use of AI for preparing court documents. The focus of the consultation paper is whether court rules are required to regulate the use of AI by legal representatives. However, the consultation also examines whether the use of AI by experts should be subject to court rules, with specific proposals set out in Part 8 of the consultation document.

The Court excluded consideration of the expert testimony of an expert on the dangers of AI and misinformation, after he submitted an expert declaration which included fake AI-generated citations to two academic articles.

Kohls v. Ellison, 2025 WL 66514 (D. Minn. Jan. 10, 2025)

Join us for the last podcast of 2025! With some festive cheer, we review 2025, with the ten key issues for expert witnesses that we've seen over the course of the year. We also check out how our predictions for 2025 turned out, before having another go for 2026 and hearing the 2025 highlights from some of the members of our Editorial Committee. 

Mr Niall Craig is a Consultant Orthopaedic Spinal Surgeon and Expert Witness specialising in complex spinal cases. He tells us about his professional journey and shares his advice for being cross examined, writing Reports, and getting referrals.  

The barrister for the Claimant was unable to explain to the court's satisfaction why she had cited several non-existent cases in pleadings. The case was referred to the High Court for its consideration which commented on the use of artificial intelligence in court proceedings.

It’s impossible to ignore Artificial Intelligence (AI) which suddenly exploded into the public conscious a couple of years ago with the launch of ChatGPT. The term AI was actually coined in 1956, and some of the underlying mathematics has been around for centuries. What changed everything was the emergence of transformers, a technology that was developed at Google that has enabled software to interpret complex human language and offer a remarkable facsimile of intelligent dialogue.

AI is infiltrating almost every area of human endeavour, so it is inevitable that it will impact your practice as an expert witness. In this introductory article, AI practitioner and Expert Witness Dr Richard Marshall discusses: the power and pitfalls of AI tools, and how AI will affect the matters on which experts opine.

In the 11th episode of the Expert Matters Podcast, we take a look at how AI is being used by Expert Witnesses. We discuss general developments related to AI in the legal sector, hear from EWI member and computer expert Richard Marshall, listen to some of the ways AI is currently being used by Expert Witnesses, and discuss some dos and don'ts when using AI. As usual, we begin with our segment on 'What's going on at EWI?' and end with 'Newsreel', a quick fire discussion of the key things you need to know this month. 

In this US case, an expert in fiduciary services used Microsoft’s Copilot to cross-check calculations he used in expert evidence. He was unable to recall the prompts he used, state the sources Copilot relied on, or explain how the tool worked and arrived at its outputs. The judge provided some useful insight into the challenges with using AI in expert evidence.