The Court then gave the following twelve reasons for this view: 1. The expert took OSR's pleading at face value without checking the underlying documents; 2. He only looked at OSR's witness evidence; 3. He refused to value the claims on any other basis or subject to any other assumptions than those propounded by OSR; 4. Actual costs incurred by OSR were disregarded in favour of made-up or calculated rates; 5. The expert made fundamental errors and did not critically analyse the Claimants' claims – and he was therefore forced to make multiple concessions under cross-examination; 6. The expert admitted under cross-examination that he was unhappy with his reports; 7. The expert admitted under cross-examination that his reports were confusing and, in one instance, misleading; 8. He had not read in detail, or at all, documents appended to his report; 9. The expert made assertions that, on cross-
examination, turned out to be based purely on the subjective views of OSR – and such assertions had been used to "plug the gaps in OSR's evidence"; 10. He did not prepare documents that he claimed to have prepared many of which contained errors; 11. Rather than checking OSR's claims, he "preferred to recite what others had told him"; and 12. The expert had not cross-referred the value of line items in his report with fair and reasonable rates. On the contrary, "he seemed almost proud that he had not embarked on that exercise". In sum, OSR's quantum expert's testimony made "a mockery of the oath which Mr Lester had taken at the outset of his evidence". Even OSR's own QC accepted that its expert fell far below the required standards expected of an independent expert. To make matters worse, by contrast AUK's expert was found by the judge to be "an independent and clear expert witness". As a result of the unreliability of the Claimants' expert, the Court could therefore only reasonably rely on AUK's expert – who had valued a number of line items at zero. Commentary It takes an extreme case such as this to drive home the danger in putting forward an expert who is not only obviously partial but who has