Competent to invest? To draft a will? To sell that real estate? The financial stakes at risk in cases involving testamentary and financial decisions may provoke legal skirmishes about whether a person was competent to invest, or to carry out a particular transaction. Here, too, an expert must be especially responsible about the application of neuropsychological and psychological testing to the investigation of competency. The Forensic Panel’s neuropsychologists and psychologists respect the importance of history and evidence from a variety of sources about a person’s decision making capacity at a particular time – for a specific set of decisions.
Testamentary and investment competency questions may also hinge on the personality and relatedness of the principals. Testing may contribute to understanding whether the characteristics of the examinee and other principals in the litigation support or refute claims of undue influence.
Neuropsychological testing is appropriate for cases for which the question arises of whether a person, fundamentally, has functional brain limitations that would have impaired ability to engage in such transactions in question. Tests derive relevance only from the specificity of what they measure. Tests measuring intelligence, memory, understanding, vocabulary, suggestibility, and/or personality measures may provide vital data to such challenging questions. The Forensic Panel’s expertise, combined with its innovative peer-review system that ensures that experts adhere to the highest levels of integrity, crystallizes objective, evidence-based findings that reflect state of the art understandings of neuropsychology and psychological testing. The Forensic Panel’s neuropsychology and psychology experts and the standards enforced by The Forensic Panel’s peer review bring the last word to contentious controversies like testamentary and investment competency.