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In a Complex Case, Collaboration Helps a Business Valuation Team Deliver Strategic Advantages 

SITUATION

Members of a legal team handling a significant piece of complex commercial litigation faced a daunting task. The lawyers had to determine the business values of 10 companies along with related economic damages—and defend the values and damages calculations in court. 

Two other issues complicated matters. The valuations and damages had to be calculated at multiple dates. Also, the opposing parties were offering stiff resistance to making data available in readily accessible formats. 

The litigation team asked FSS to step in. We were engaged to ascertain business valuations of the 10 entities, calculate economic damages along multiple timelines, provide forensic services to uncover data, and offer expert testimony in court.

STRATEGY

It was clear from the outset that we would need to deploy a cross-discipline team of FSS professionals, including business valuation experts and forensic technology specialists, to overcome the challenges involving data and to make valuations and damages estimates that would stand up to scrutiny by the courts.

Leveraging state-of-the-art technology and investigative expertise, FSS’s forensic technology team was able to make specific data acquisition requests and marshal disparate structured and unstructured data into manageable formats for analysis and presentation. This was a pivotal step that laid the groundwork for the subsequent phases of our valuation analysis.

With data in hand, our business valuation team was able to perform a high-level analysis regarding the potential recovery to the legal team’s client, based upon ranges of potential values of each of the business entities. By engaging in this step, FSS allowed the legal team to weigh risk and reward and determine how their client’s expert fees would best be spent. 

Armed with the FSS analysis, the legal team was able to convince opposing counsel to stipulate to the values of six of the 10 business entities. This was a key victory in the strategic management of the case. It streamlined the litigation process and allowed the legal team to allocate expert fees to the four entities that the client viewed as most vital to its interests. 

RESULTS

FSS prepared more than a dozen reports for the legal team and its client,  including multiple business valuations and calculations of damages totaling tens of millions of dollars. 

We supported these findings during six days of expert testimony by members of FSS. Our experts withstood cross-examination from three separate teams of opposing counsel and communicated the complex valuation and damages information in a way that was both authoritative yet easy for attorneys, litigants, and triers of fact to absorb. 

In the end, the legal team achieved a significant and favorable jury award on behalf of their client. The results speak to the strategic advantages that litigators and their clients can gain when they work with a team employing a collaborative, cross-discipline approach to valuations and economic damages calculations.

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