Good Things Come to Those Who Don’t Wait
Having been retained for a number of significant litigation engagements over the years, Mercer Capital has had the opportunity to observe a variety of theories on the best time for attorneys to retain experts for their lawsuits.
In many lawsuits, the testimony of your business valuation, economic damages, or investment banking expert will be among the more important elements of your case, making it vital that the expert be involved early in the process. However, some attorneys tend to wait until the last minute to hire their experts, ostensibly under the theory that hiring experts late in the game minimizes the overall expense of the case. After all, the thinking goes, if the experts are not hired until it is certain that their expert reports will be needed, then the looming deadline provides an automatic limit to the number of hours that can be billed.
This approach is flawed for a number of reasons. In our experience, it is far better to involve the experts early. The sooner your business valuation, economic damages, or investment banking expert is involved, the sooner the expert will be able to provide you with an economic perspective on the facts of your case or your theory of damages. The longer you wait, the later your expert will be able to provide economic insight, good or bad, and the less time you will have to address any issues raised by your expert.
As an example of the above, Mercer Capital was contacted by an attorney concerning a significant breach of contract case involving a warehouse and distribution business whose business had been damaged when a key supplier cancelled a supply contact. The lawsuit was very well developed by the time we were contacted, and detailed pleadings existed concerning the mechanism by which the plaintiff's business was damaged and the results of the defendant's actions. The result of the case as presented to us was that, aside from some distraction and aggravation on the part of the plaintiff, a big piece of the case was essentially a wash, with very little economic damages. It would have been beneficial to the plaintiff's lawyer to have known much earlier in the process that the damaged part of the operation was essentially breaking even (at best) prior to the breach of contract, and that there were few fixed costs that continued after the breach. The bottom line is that our estimate of damages was far lower than anticipated by either the plaintiff or his attorney.
In addition to the advantages associated with gaining perspective described above, hiring your expert early provides the following advantages:
- Your expert can help you understand financial and economic concepts that are relevant to the dispute at hand. There are words and concepts that have particular meanings in a legal context that are unfamiliar or even surprising to non-attorneys. Similarly, there are certain elements of finance, accounting, and economics that might surprise those who do not work in these areas.
- Your expert can help you figure out the discovery and documentation requirements associated with your case. This can help you give your client a better understanding of the overall cost of the lawsuit in terms of time, legal fees, and possible accounting, forensic accounting, or other services that might be required.