10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Unintended benefits, 2004-07-01
I discovered this book after reading "A Guide to Forensic Testimony" (ISBN 0201752794), which is aimed at IT professionals. I had little interest in being an expert witness, but have been a witness in litigation and wanted to better understand the process. In my quest for another book I came across this one, and benefited from two levels - (1) I learned even more about rules of evidence, and expert testimony, and (2) discovered a methodology for computing values associated with business interruptions that have some potential to meet requirements of Rules 104(a) and (e), and 703 [Federal Rules of Evidence].First, the material related to evidence and expert testimony - this book covers qualifications, expert roles and advice to the expert, and expert reports and admissibility of evidence with respect to economic, accounting and damages experts. More importantly, the author provides excellent advice on using experts from multiple disciplines, which is prudent given the complexity of measuring business interruption losses. The material about this aspect of the book is not only consistent with the book I cited above in general terms, but also went much deeper, and completely addressed the issues and factors associated with the subject from a legal point of view.
The second aspect of this book, the methodologies for analyzing loss attacks the problem from multiple angles, which can be aggregated or tailored to the legal theory of a particular case. The angles include an economic framework for the lost profits estimation process, and how to conduct a business interruption loss analysis. The book goes into more depth with a comprehensive description for conducting an industry analysis, especially with respect to relating overall industry growth to the plaintiff's growth, and in-depth chapters on projecting lost revenues and cost analysis and profitability. The methodologies alone or in total are complete, and should meet and Rule 104(a), (e), or Rule 703 test (i.e., "Daubert" issues).
Unintended benefits from this book came in the methodologies. I am an IT consultant who specializes in service management, which encompasses business continuity and system availability, among other things. The methodologies, I discovered, can be as easily applied to a proactive approach to determining cost of system unavailability of company-critical systems as they can be in determining after-the-fact losses. This allows realistic impact analyses that show costs, trade-offs and affects on the loss of critical systems. Not so coincidently, this same data can be used in court to show prior due diligence if loses do occur based on third-party breaches of contracts or warranty issues. More importantly, even though this book was written before the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the methodologies given in this book can be used to validate compliance with certain sections of the act, most notably 404 (also, to a degree, 302, 409 and 906).
Overall, this book is one of the best professional investments I've made - and the reasons for it are purely serendipitous.