Overview
Our Consulting Philosophy — Help our clients better understand and manage the risk of litigation, value settlement opportunities, develop settlement negotiation strategies and clearly communicate these issues to senior management.
We do some of our best work in times of crisis and as part of a strong litigation team. A more measured long-term value can be delivered to our clients when we are on board at an early stage in the litigation.
As an outside consultant, our role is to reevaluate the situation, to translate the words and opinions into a quantitative picture and to bolster the litigation team’s assessments and decisions.
We recognize that litigation is a process in which lawyers handle the tactical decisions and legal strategies. However, businesses are also concerned with the risks and the bottom line. Management often wants a concise analysis that proves that the legal strategy selected will not only yield the highest likelihood of a victory, but also that it is the best business decision. They need to understand settlement opportunities and whether they make business sense. The quantitative analysis we develop is easy to communicate to top management or to the board of directors.
Individual cases
When a suit or series of suits are of sufficient complexity or of significant enough consequences, you may not be comfortable evaluating them and/or presenting the results by yourself. The Litigation Risk Management institute has successfully conducted Litigation Risk Management/Settlement Valuation Analyses in a broad spectrum of cases involving national class action settlements, toxic torts, product liability, securities law, patent infringement, insurance and breach of contract. We have worked with attorneys and businesspeople dealing with issues concerning all stages of litigation, and with potential bottom-line and organizational business impacts.
We assist our clients to:
- Focus litigation and business teams on the critical issues
- Understand how the critical issues affect the litigation risk and the settlement valuation
- Understand the impact of strategy decisions on trial outcomes and costs
- Communicate the litigation risk and settlement valuation to senior management and the board in quantitative, unambiguous, terms.
Megacases
When one piece of litigation or a series of related cases threaten to distract or even overwhelm management because of large potential adverse outcomes or massive transaction costs, what is needed is an experienced advisor and guide who approaches the litigation as a business problem, but with the ability to understand and take into account the legal complexities.
We help our clients to:
- Put all of the pieces together in one comprehensive, explicit, quantitative picture
- To understand the impact of early settlements and trial outcomes on overall strategy decisions and the ultimate outcomes
- Justify and explain settlement and litigation strategies in clear unambiguous terms
- Integrate potential insurance coverage litigation issues with the ongoing litigation and business strategies
- Evaluate and manage settlement and ADR opportunities
Intellectual Property Litigation
IP Litigation can present many layers of complexity. Interlinking issues of validity, infringement, royalty rates and royalty basis can lead to trial outcomes and consequential business impacts that are often not adequately considered by a litigation team focused on legal and factual issues central to the trial. Dr. Beron’s extensive experience in management, technology, and Litigation Risk Management / Settlement Valuation consulting enables him to bring a unique and valuable perspective to IP litigation valuation and management.
Portfolio of Litigation
We evaluate a series of cases and place a value on the overall portfolio. We can also analyze the range of outcomes of the portfolio, and can place values on subsets, as well as look at portfolio effects. When possible, we develop templates for each of several types of case that encompass most of the litigation. Quick but useful trees can be developed for the remaining cases that don’t fit the templates. Alternatively, if most of the cases do not fit a set of templates, we use quick, simple evaluations of each case.
Templates and Forms for Ongoing, Routine Litigation
The Litigation Risk Management Institute will develop a number of decision tree templates to be used by staff to apply to ongoing litigation in a cost effective way. These templates facilitate the application of the principles of Litigation Risk Management Analysis by lower management across an entire organization with a minimum of training, time and expense.
Insurance Coverage Litigation
The Litigation Risk Management Institute has developed a number of unique tools to assist in insurance coverage litigation. We have a database that can build and display a coverage map for even the most complex case. The coverage map can address issues of indemnity and defense coverage and exhaustion, as well as calculate claims against a group of policies from one insurer that are spread out all over the map. These claims can easily be calculated for various assumptions of trigger and occurrence. The tools are invaluable for evaluating both trial and settlement strategies.