Terms and Conditions of Service

Initial Verbal Assessment
QED will undertake an initial assessment of the document, and will provide a verbal opinion (over the telephone) on whether the document is suitable for analysis and an approximate cost.

On agreement with the client, QED will provide the following services:

Short Written Report
QED will undertake analysis of the document as agreed with the client. Upon completion of the analysis, QED will provide the client with a short written report containing its observations, the most significant indicators, and opinion. This report is suitable in most cases to assist clients in channelling their investigations in a productive direction.

Formal Full Written Report
QED will undertake a full analysis of the document. Upon completion of the analysis, QED will provide the client with a formal full written report containing observations, recommendations, and a written opinion.

Opinions
No opinions can be expressed regarding the guilt or innocence of any individual or party. QED is also unable to declare that deception does or does not occur in the documents. QED may only express an opinion as to whether the linguistic characteristics of the documents, or specific parts of documents, contain markers associated with deception identified in academic linguistic studies.

While QED may make inferences regarding age, gender, education and socio-linguistic background on the basis of an individual’s language, it does not include making inferences on their psychological make-up.

Clients should be aware that “linguistic fingerprinting” does not exist, and that, in its current state of development, authorship cannot be 100% attributed to a specific individual. However, forensic linguistics may be helpful in reducing the number of suspect authors for a given document on the basis of shared unusual characteristics.

QED reports are to be used on an ADVICE ONLY basis,
and NOT FOR SERVICE.

Document Format Requirements
Computerised linguistic analysis requires the formatting of documents as word (.doc) or text (.txt) files. While QED will prepare handwritten, typed, or word-processed documents for analysis, this will add to the time undertaken to complete the work. We request that clients provide, where possible, copies of the documents in a suitable format.

Timetable
The nature of the work makes it difficult to estimate precisely how long analysis of a document may take to complete. However, QED will provide the client with an estimate of the time it will take to complete the work, and will endeavour to deal with the case as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Fees
Our charges are normally based on an hourly rate. We also operate on a 'per project' basis.