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PI Brief Update

Fundamental Dishonesty? Court needs to see the Homework, not just the answer - Michael Brooks Reid, Temple Garden Chambers

25/09/25. Michael Brooks Reid comments on an aspect of the recent High Court judgment in Brown v Morgan Sindall Construction and Infrastructure Ltd [2025] EWHC 2204 (KB).

The FD argument

Following trial, the Defendant alleged that the Claimant, Mr. Brown, was fundamentally dishonest in exaggerating his psychological injuries, arguing for the well-known consequences that this entails. The Defendant’s FD argument rested predominantly on the expert evidence of the Defendant’s psychiatrist, Dr. Wise, who had administered a series of proprietary psychological "validity tests", said to be consistent with a 99% probability of malingering.

The Issue

The issue was that the tests themselves, and the Claimant's answers, were not disclosed to the Court or the Claimant's legal team. This was due to licensing conditions imposed by the test publishers, intended to protect the tests' integrity by preventing them from becoming public knowledge and susceptible to...

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The opinions expressed in the articles are the authors' own, not those of Law Brief Publishing Ltd, and are not necessarily commensurate with general legal or medico-legal expert consensus of opinion and/or literature. Any medical content is not exhaustive but at a level for the non-medical reader to understand. 

Professional advice should always be obtained before applying any information to particular circumstances.

Excerpts from judgments and statutes are Crown copyright. Any Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of OPSI and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland under the Open Government Licence.