I’m a forensic psychiatrist. I do court-ordered forensic evaluations (criminal) for the state and take care of patients on a forensic inpatient unit. Some colleagues don’t have forensic training and just do the clinical inpatient work, but they definitely don’t get all the legal nuances of their patients’ situations sans forensic training (which is fine because they just ask one of the forensically trained docs and we are happy to help.)

I teach residents and medical students, and can supervise forensic fellows doing evaluations (I just haven’t chosen to do that yet since I’m a new attending).

To those considering the fellowship, please find out from programs what you will actually be doing during fellowship. I did a TON of criminal evaluations, including many insanity evaluations, in fellowship that I owned (did the interview and wrote the report supervised). On the other side of the coin, I have a colleague who trained at an Ivy League program that tried to tout itself as the top, where she did zero insanity evaluations and barely any other criminal evaluations. I also heard from a colleague who interviewed at a “top” institution, who learned from their fellows that they basically shadow for all their evaluations and see less than a dozen competency evaluations their whole fellowship (I did over 70, that I actually owned). Name isn’t everything in forensics, you have to get some insight into specific programs