Asylum Insights
ServicesSix instructions. Choose the smallest one that answers the question.
Expert evidence is not improved by length. It is improved by precision about what is in dispute. Most instructions need one report and one issue, and over-scoping is the most common reason a report costs more than it was worth.
- Scope
- Agreed before any fee
- Fee basis
- Fixed, in writing
- Legal aid
- Scoped to rates
What each instruction is for
Expert Witness Reports
The complete instrument: instruction and questions, basis of expertise, sources with their limits stated, analysis against the applicant’s specific profile, treatment of protection and relocation where live, and a declaration of duty to the tribunal.
Country Condition Reports
Where the dispute is confined to conditions — prevalence of a practice, reach of a security service, treatment of returnees at the airport — a targeted report costs less and reads better than a full report padded out to look thorough.
Credibility Assessment
An explanation of the mechanisms by which a truthful account presents as inconsistent: trauma and sequencing, late disclosure of sexual violence, interpretation and dialect, calendar conversion, and culturally patterned narrative style.
Oral Testimony
Attendance in person or by video link, with pre-hearing briefing on the issues actually in dispute. An expert who cannot defend the report under cross-examination should not have written it.
Litigation Support & Advisory
Gap analysis of policy notes and respondent country evidence, identification of conclusions the cited sources do not support, and briefing for counsel cross-examining another expert. Often no report is filed at all.
NGO & Legal Aid Support
Short-form expert letters and advisory opinions scoped to legal aid rates and NGO budgets, plus research supporting country guidance litigation and policy submissions.
Start from the refusal, not the catalogue
If you tell us what the decision letter says, we will tell you which of these is proportionate — including when the answer is none of them.
- The refusal attacks conditions in the country
- Country condition report, or a full expert report if protection and relocation are also in dispute.
- The refusal attacks the account as inconsistent
- Credibility assessment, usually alongside country evidence establishing the context the account is being judged against.
- The respondent has filed its own country evidence
- Litigation support first. A written critique may be enough; a competing report is not always needed.
- There is a hearing and the report is already filed
- Oral testimony, with a pre-hearing conference on the points the presenting officer is likely to take.
Tell us what is in dispute and we will scope the smallest report that answers it.
Scope, timescale, and a fixed fee confirmed in writing before any work begins.
Every enquiry is confidential. Nothing is shared with immigration authorities or any government body.