At the end of January the Expert Witness Institute sent a survey to its membership asking about something that rarely gets discussed: the admin. Not the expert work itself but everything around it — the scheduling, the invoicing, the filing, the chasing. The EWI co-designed and distributed the survey with support from Fortythree Tech who are developing practice management software for expert witnesses following a conversation about the needs of one of EWI’s members.  We were keen to understand the wider issues for members and they want to ensure the research for the product there are developing is grounded in real data rather than assumptions.

Without the EWI’s reach and the trust its members place in the Institute, a survey of this depth would not have been possible. 184 experts responded, ranging from those in their first year of practice to veterans with over fifteen years’ experience, handling anywhere from a handful of cases to over a hundred, across dozens of specialisms. What they told us was sometimes expected, sometimes surprising and occasionally counterintuitive.

The headline finding was not a surprise: invoice chasing is the number one problem. What was surprising was who suffers most. Sixty-four per cent of experts with a dedicated PA chase invoices regularly or constantly, compared with thirty-three per cent of solo operators. Having admin support does not solve the problem — it makes it visible. At caseloads of 100+ seventy-two per cent rank it as their single biggest issue.