A legally experienced therapist can provide an attorney with additional insights into his client's behaviors. Clinical psychological treatment and evaluation, when combined with legal expertise, are helpful tools in assessing the value of a case. In the area of family law, in addition to child custody evaluations, referral to a psychotherapist for divorcing couples, as well as their children, will be useful. The credibility of an attorney's case depends upon the quality of the evidence. Two critical elements in a case are veracity and malingering, otherwise known as secondary gain.
Psychological testimony is relevant on issues of truth, veracity, and malingering.
Additionally, it is relevant to issues concerning the etiology of damages. Evidence involving judicious clinical treatment and carefully prepared psychological testing can help to differentiate veracity from malingering and help to clarify issues of intent and causation. There are reasons that some attorneys may be likely to resist the use of psychotherapists on their cases. In many instances the attorney and the therapist quite literally don't speak the same language. Attorneys may be quick, then, to judge the field of psychology as inexact or unscientific.