Since the Court hearing last Monday I have learned a new collective noun: a chamber of barristers. We had Theodor van Sante representing the FCA, and Tom Weitzman representing the PRA, both of 3VB. Representing the applicants (Equitable Life and Utmost Life) was Martin Moore of Erskine Chambers. Each was supported by a whole team of assistants, passing post-it stickers up and down as the proceedings proceeded.
Considering the numbers of lawyers involved, and considering they all had three weeks from the date of my original submission on 1 November, I was surprised by their difficulty in getting even the non-technical facts right. For example:
Martin Moore QC: The various extracts that Dr Buckner has produced are not properly evidence. They’re simply extracts from speeches that have been given. They are not experts in the sense that the court would understand expert evidence to be.
There are several layers of confusion and wrongness here. First, only one quotation in my original submission was definitely from a speech.1 The speech was by Don Kohn, who said
While economists are famous for disagreeing with each other on virtually every other conceivable issue, when it comes to this one there is no professional disagreement: The only appropriate way to calculate the value of a very low-risk liability is to use a very low-risk discount rate.
If a recognised authority like Kohn (senior fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve etc) states something like that in a speech, presumably there is an important reason for doing so: presumably he thought he was stating an important fact that everyone should recognise. Why is his statement ‘not properly evidence’? Is there any phenomenon that makes a statement in a speech false, and the same statement true when presented in person to the Court? Surely not. And why is Kohn not an expert ‘in the sense that the court would understand expert evidence [sic] to be’? What a mess.
But it gets worse.
