Cases - Mitchell v Mulholland

Record details

Name

Mitchell v Mulholland

Date

[1973]

Citation

117 SJ 307, CA

Keywords

Expert witness

Summary

The claimant sued for damages caused in a car crash that the defendants were responsible for. He called an actuary and a chartered accountant as expert witnesses on loss of earnings and an economist to provide evidence on the prospects of future inflation. The trial judge and the Court of Appeal were not satisfied that these experts offered a more reliable method of calculation than the traditional multiplier method used by the courts. The Court of Appeal was asked to consider the costs award for these witnesses, given that the claimant had won, but that their evidence had been largely inadmissible:

'The evidence of the economist had been neither necessary nor proper, so specious had been his testimony, and all the costs of his evidence should be disallowed. There had been some residual, though limited, value in calling the actuary and the chartered accountant, and it had not been wholly unreasonable to call them. But as they had based their evidence largely on that of the economist it had reached far more expansive dimensions than it would otherwise have done. The [claimant] should recover only one third of the cost of calling them.'