The crucial role of medical expert witnesses: crafting medico-legal reports and working with editors

Medical expert witnesses bridge the gap between medicine and law by providing expert opinions and testimony. They are typically experienced healthcare professionals, and one of their primary responsibilities is to draft medico-legal reports, which play a pivotal role in shaping the outcome of legal cases. In this blog article, we delve into what a medical expert witness does, explore why they write medico-legal reports, and why they work with specialist freelance medical editors.

The role of a medical expert witness

A medical expert witness assists the court by providing their specialised knowledge and expertise in medical matters. They are experienced in a particular speciality and they are often asked to clarify complex medical concepts and interpret medical records in order to provide impartial opinions based on the available evidence and their medical expertise.

Medico-legal reports

A medical expert witness writes a medico-legal report to:

• Document their expert opinions: medico-legal reports document the expert witness’s findings, opinions and conclusions, providing a written record of the expert’s assessment of the case.

• Provide clarity: legal cases can be complicated and generate numerous documents and pieces of evidence. Medico-legal reports serve as a structured and organised summary of the medical expert’s analysis, making it easier for both the legal teams and the court to understand the key issues.

Why expert witnesses work with freelance medical editors

Even the most knowledgeable experts may struggle with presenting their findings effectively in writing, as well as with finding enough hours in the day. This is where working with a specialist freelance medical editor can be a gamechanger for an expert witness.

Medico-legal reports can be dense with technical jargon and complex medical terminology. While an expert witness understands the intricacies of their own specialist area, conveying these ideas clearly to others (such as solicitors, judges, insurance companies, other medical expert witnesses and the claimants/defendants) is a different challenge altogether. A freelance medical editor can bridge this gap:

• Simplify complex medical language: medical editors can rephrase and restructure sentences to make them more understandable to a non-medical audience, ensuring that the report's message is clear.

• Correct grammar and punctuation, and ensure consistency: medical editors can spot and correct errors and inconsistencies in a medico-legal report that might otherwise distract from the content.

• Check clarity and readability: medical editors can help with rephrasing text to make the text suitable to read for the intended audience.

• Offer a fresh perspective: a medical editor, unfamiliar with the case, can provide an objective viewpoint, helping the expert witness identify areas where their opinion may not be clear.

• Fact checking: medical editors can carry out a thorough crosscheck of the medical records against an expert witness’s report to ensure no errors have inadvertently been introduced.

• Compile chronologies: a medical editor with extensive experience in working on medico-legal reports can even help expert witnesses compile their chronologies. They are experienced in extracting the key records relevant to the case and the expert witness’s speciality, and then transcribing these into a chronology.

• Check formatting: medical editors can ensure that the medico-legal report follows a professional-looking format, including consistent styling, font size, heading levels, headers and footers, lists and referencing, table of contents, page layout and alignment, and good organisation into logical sections and subsections.

Final thoughts

A skilled and experienced medical editor can be an invaluable ally to expert witnesses, not only saving them precious time but also helping them to present their knowledge and opinions in a clear, impartial and compelling manner.

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See here for more information on working with a medical editor.

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A note on terminology: The terms medical copyeditor, medical proofreader and medical editor are often confused and used interchangeably. To add to the confusion, there are yet other terms used for different niches such as plain-English editor, medico-legal copyeditor or editorial assistant (the latter is commonly used in medical communications). I personally use medical editor to describe my role, and medical editing to describe both medical copyediting and medical proofreading, as this suggests a hybrid approach as per my own clients' preferences ... plus, it's simpler! See here for more detail on the traditional differences between proofreading and copyediting.