General Advice – March 2022

Please Pay Your Bills

Medical negligence cases typically involve reams and reams (or megabytes and megabytes) of material to decipher, digest and analyse carefully. It takes many hours.

Some solicitors, typically those acting for plaintiffs, are keen to secure some form of verbal advice before a written report is solicited. I can understand the tactics.

Nonetheless, the expert is still required to expend all of those hours, distil the facts carefully and formulate a reliable opinion, even if it is expressed verbally.

The requesting solicitor therefore should not be surprised that there will be a bill for this service.

I recently had to chase a solicitor from an interstate firm for a bill that had remained unpaid for nine months. His initial excuse was that our telephone conversation lasted for only 11 minutes (completely discounting the hours that I had spent in preparation) and his ultimate excuse was that I must have known that my opinion was not going to support his client and therefore, why should I bill at all.

Medicolegal experts are there to assess the entire truth (if available) and give an honest, objective, transparent and most of all, defendable opinion. Whether it is helpful or not to your client, as the requesting solicitor, you should still pay the bill.