Do you need to hire a handwriting expert?

If you are an attorney, you are probably already familiar with hiring an expert witness for your case. Choosing the right expert witness is important. Most have worked with expert witnesses at some point in their career, but most haven’t hired a Forensic Document Examiner.

If your case involves a forged check, a last will and testament, a pre-nuptial agreement, a contract, or a signature that doesn’t seem to be authentic, you should be looking for a Forensic Document Examiner.

You should know a couple of things before you make your first phone call to a Forensic Document Examiner.  First, how many documents do you need analyzed? These are the documents that you and your client think may be forged or not authentic. The Forensic Document Examiner will refer to these as “questioned documents”. This is important to know since the Forensic Document Examiner will charge a fee per questioned document.

You will also need to provide samples of your client’s known handwriting so the Forensic Document Examiner can compare them against the questioned document(s). These exemplars are commonly referred to as Known Documents. The known documents should be from the same time frame and you should provide as many known documents as you can.  For a Forensic Document Examiner to do the best job possible, the known samples should also be a high-quality copy.  No one is going to win a case by looking at a poor fax copy.

Do you have to hire a local Forensic Document Examiner?

Most and clients feel they have to hire someone in their own hometown.  However, this simply isn’t true anymore. Most cases these days can be inspected through high-resolution scans, email, faxes, and overnight mail. Since the Covid-19 situation, courts around the country are accepting zoom testimony from both and expert witnesses. This expands your ability to hire the best in the USA, rather than restricting yourself to a local expert.

If your case involves originals, and the originals can’t be sent overnight, then you might incur an additional travel expense so the Forensic Document Examiner can review the original documents.