Damages Strategy and Discovery
When FEA Advisors gets involved in a matter early, we can provide our clients with an early sense of potential damages value or exposure. A review of information contained in the Complaint and a sample of financial and transaction documents allows us to advise our clients on the range of potential economic impacts and the key factual and economic drivers that should be addressed. Armed with these insights, attorneys and their clients can make a more informed decision to either pursue a settlement or, if emboldened to move forward with the litigation, position the case strategy to address key damages drivers.
Early Case Assessment and Strategy
Determining causation is necessary when calculating financial harm in legal or other forensic contexts. Causation establishes the link between a specific action, event, or circumstance and the resulting financial consequences. Without establishing causation, it can become challenging to attribute financial losses directly to a particular incident or set of circumstances.
By establishing a causal link between specific actions or events and the resulting losses, we can calculate damages with greater reliability and authority. Such calculations may include direct financial losses, such as property damage or lost income, as well as indirect losses, such as diminished earning capacity or loss of business opportunities.
Causation determination also helps identify any mitigating factors that may have influenced the financial outcome. It allows us to assess whether other intervening events or circumstances contributed to the losses and whether steps could have been taken to mitigate or prevent them.
Causation Determination
When FEA Advisors gets involved in a matter early, we can assist our clients with crafting their motions, document requests, interrogatories, and deposition inquiries to maximize the gathering of key data to be used in the damages calculations and information to support or rebut damages assumptions.
We also help our clients use fact witnesses to build the damages case. We assist in the preparation of deposition outlines for key fact witnesses and 30(b)(6) deponents – ranging from a thematic list to a detailed script of questions with follow-ups – designed to solicit information that would otherwise be subject to assumption in a damages analysis. We have also attended depositions, either in-person or remotely, allowing just-in-time input of follow-up inquiries, course corrections and requests for documents that can help the our clients maximize the value gained from the deposition-taking exercise.
In many cases, the gathering of relevant data can be a complex and time-consuming process, and the quality and reliability of the data can impact the accuracy of the damages analysis. When FEA Advisors is involved in a matter early, we can effectively advise our clients on the relevant importance of gathering certain types of data.
Fact Finding
We often assist our clients in settlement negotiations by identifying key assumptions, the sensitivity of those assumptions, and the range of economic values when those assumptions are adjusted.
FEA Advisors also serves as a “devil’s advocate.” We understand the importance of anticipating, considering, and preparing for inquiries from the other party’s counsel that challenge expert opinions and their underlying bases. Such an appreciation, and the processes experts employ to address those challenges, can provide a valuable objective, and detached counterpoint to the advocacy focus of the legal team.
We also help identify areas of common ground (e.g., how to estimate a subset of damages claims) and reduce the scope of issues where the experts “agree to disagree.”