Medico-legal work
In recent years Dr Stein has specialized in medico-legal work as well as private practice. He sees about 60 to 80 cases per year and gives evidence in court around 10-15 times per year. There are two main areas of interest. First he has specialized in personal injury cases. They take the form of traffic accidents, work accidents, and injuries as a consequence of medical treatment where psychiatric problems can sometimes follow on. In these cases teasing out precisely how much of the psychiatry actually relates to the injury itself and how much to other pre existing issues represents the core of the problem and he conducts a detailed and in depth analysis of each case. In personal injury cases he has worked for both the claimant (60%) and defendant(40%) but in most other types of case the more recent pattern has been to be commissioned as mainly as a single joint expert ( SJE).
The second main area of expertise is in the realms of Child Protection. Mothers who are in care proceedings often have psychiatric disorder and the courts require an unbiased assessment of its relevance to the childcare and any associated risks there might be for the child. Such assessments are complicated and entail making a detailed adult psychiatric assessment of the mother as well as an understanding of the social circumstances leading to the removal of the child, and these cases will often come with several large files. He has completed around 140 assessments of this type and been to court on more than 30 occasions as an expert witness on the psychiatry involved in child protection cases and judges have sometimes commended the detail and quality of these reports. He has a good understanding of the social services and legal issues as well as the psychiatry involved in these cases.
Areas covered have been in the family courts ( Child protection cases and contact cases); criminal courts ( psychiatric assessment individuals with a wide variety of offences) Civil courts ( mainly personal injury post traumatic stress disorder; other personal injury; somatisation ;psychiatric aspects of obstetrics and employment issues) He also covers assessments for the whole gamut of adult general psychiatry including some forensic psychiatry and is able to visit prisons as and when this is required.