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considerable legal costs. Take a case for instance where the Claimant's medical expert asserts that the accident accelerated the Claimant's symptoms by 10 years and the Defendant's expert asserts that the symptoms would have occurred within 5 years in any event. Legal advisers at the door of court will tend to seek settlement on the basis of a 7.5 year acceleration. The costs of such litigation can be reduced if the medical experts will agree to meet or talk well before trial and are content to prepare a joint letter accepting 7.5 years as a not unlikely compromise.

22.5 Cases involving malingering or functional overlay do not easily lend themselves to such agreements and are more likely to end in a full trial.

22.6 It is common practice now for county court judges to order that the medical experts should meet, discuss the issues and provide an agreed supplementary report setting out the areas of agreement and identifying the areas of dispute. Guidance on the practice for doing so was provided as long ago as 1943 in Harrison v Liverpool,² when the Court of Appeal suggested that such orders should result in a supplementary report setting out the areas of agreement of facts and of opinion.

22.7 Evidence Agreed medical reports can be placed in the trial bundle and read by the trial judge before the hearing. These agreed reports are admissible in evidence: see The Civil Evidence Act 1972. The content of the discussion between the experts shall not be referred to at trial unless the parties agree: CPR rule 35.12(4).

22.8 Judges have in the past encouraged parties to agree medical evidence so that medical experts are not called to hearings unnecessarily and so that costs are reduced.³

22.9 Contrary evidence To what extent is the agreement of a medical report a bar to the party calling contrary evidence? Where the experts reach agreement on an issue that agreement shall not bind the parties unless the parties expressly agree to be so bound: CPR part 35.12(5).