Services

Economic Analysis

Practice Alert: Financial Rescue Plan Proposes Reverse Auctions

Huron's economists can provide fundamental insights into complicated problems and will help you present them effectively to litigators, judges, juries, regulatory authorities, and corporate clients.

Economic and statistical analyses, often of large and cumbersome databases, are key to understanding many of the situations that arise in connection with litigation, complex transactions, or public policy issues. Huron helps by delivering empirical analyses and testimony.

The Economic Analysis group includes in-house experts and leading academic economists with considerable testifying experience in matters that span the entire business litigation spectrum; covering industries such as defense and emergency management, energy, financial services, government, healthcare, higher education, manufacturing, media, pharmaceuticals, retail, software, telecommunications, and transportation.

Our practice areas include:

  • Antitrust
  • Securities, Finance, and Banking
  • Employment and Labor
  • Fair Lending and Consumer Financial Economics
  • Product Liability and Complex Claims
  • Damages and Commercial Litigation
  • Healthcare, Pharmaceutical and Payor/Provider Disputes
  • Competition/Regulatory Economics

Antitrust
Huron’s economists and industry experts provide services and testimony in antitrust litigation and merger reviews. We apply economic theory and empirical analysis to shed light on a broad array of antitrust topics including:

  • Definition of relevant market
  • Existence and abuse of monopoly power
  • Quantification and relevance of barriers to entry
  • Horizontal and vertical restrictions
    • Inter-brand competition
    • Coordination among competitors
    • Tying arrangements
  • Price fixing, price discrimination, predatory pricing, and price squeeze allegations
    • Robinson Patman
    • Sherman Act
  • Pre- and Post-merger and acquisition review
    • Hart-Scott-Rodino analysis

Securities, Finance, and Banking
Our financial economists, statisticians, and accountants provide insights in securities disputes and investigations covering a broad spectrum of issues. We have prepared numerous stock price event studies for various purposes, including corporate tax disputes, tortious interference in a dispute over damages, allegedly due to public statements made by our client, and management insider gains from alleged stock manipulation.

Our expertise extends to many types of security litigation, including:

  • Section 10(b)-5 Damages Calculations
  • Derivative Actions & Special Litigation Committees Investigations
  • Options Backdating & Executive Compensation
  • IPO Allocations, Laddering, Front- Running, Market Timing, and Late Trading
  • Anti-Money Laundering

Employment and Labor
Huron professionals advise clients on a broad spectrum of economic, accounting, and statistical issues that arise in employment and labor disputes. We assist clients in responding to Title VII and ADEA discrimination claims, OFCCP investigations, as well as alleged FLSA and state labor code violations.

Discrimination: Our labor economists use their knowledge of labor markets, together with rigorous economic analysis and court-accepted statistical techniques, to assess the merit of discrimination claims and to quantify any potential monetary damages that could arise from such claims.

Wage and Hour: In wage and hour disputes, we provide assistance at every stage of the litigation process, from discovery and class certification, to calculating damages for settlement purposes. We are experts in the design and implementation of statistically valid surveys and time-and-motion observational studies. These studies can quantify the variability in worker responsibilities to address class certification issues, and the percentages of time worker classes spend working in exempt tasks to address liability issues. Our economists have developed models to calculate the number of overtime hours employees likely did work in the past to address damages issues. To help shield companies from future litigation, we audit company employment and pay practices to determine whether they satisfy EEOC and OFCCP criteria. Our reviews help identify individuals, or groups of individuals, who may be adversely impacted by current or planned employment policies.

Fair Lending and Consumer Financial Economics
Huron’s economists and statisticians have helped many of the nation's leading insurance and financial institutions respond to government investigations and class action litigations focused on the sale of financial products to consumers. We have provided advice and expert testimony related to allegations of unfair lending practices, including alleged racial and ethnicity bias in automobile and mortgage financing and to allegations of biased insurance policies. Our large-scale computing capabilities have enabled us to recalculate and testify to the amount due by individual debtors to a national credit card company in response to a class action lawsuit alleging company miscalculations. Our economists have also presented statistical evidence to state commissioners of insurance concerning the actuarial fairness and racial neutrality of underwriting criteria.

Product Liability and Complex Claims
Huron’s economists and industry experts combine to quantify past and expected future economic losses arising from environmental accidents and exposure. Our analysis of environmental exposure has covered a broad range of industries and product lines including asbestos, chemical and building products, and tobacco. We blend our expertise in economic and epidemiological modeling, statistics and econometrics, survey design, and computer programming to project the pattern of exposure and disease onset, and to estimate the number and dollar value of future claims. We have forecasted morbidity, mortality, and property damage associated with environmental exposure; we have forecasted expected medical care costs in class-action personal injury matters; and, we have assisted insurance company actuary departments in various projects related to home, health, and automobile insurance pricing and coverage.

Damages and Commercial Litigation
Our economists team with Huron's worldclass accountants to provide sophisticated and reliable damages calculations. Our work has relied on the interpretation of industry- and company-specific facts as well as the analysis of large transactional databases. Our damages assessments have involved a broad range of commercial litigation matters across a variety of claims including:

  • Breach of Contract/Breach of Fiduciary Duty
  • Fraudulent Business Practices
  • Trade Secrets/Intellectual Property
  • Class Action Litigation

Healthcare, Pharmaceutical and Payor/Provider Disputes
Our Economic Consulting group has deep experience in the Healthcare and Pharmaceutical industries with an understanding of payor and provider operations and data keeping. Our experience includes:

  • Analysis of very large amounts of data related to government investigations of hospital systems' Medicare and Medicaid billings programs.
  • Designing and implementing statistical sampling methodologies to help resolve payment disputes.
  • Analysis and expert testimony in pharmaceutical disputes, including alleged collusion, price fixing, anticompetitive agreements, and disputes involving intellectual property rights.
  • Analysis of large pharmaceutical transactions and claims datasets for the PBM industry.

Competition/Regulatory Economics
Huron’s economists have extensive experience in analyzing issues associated with industries that are regulated and/or transitioning from regulation to unregulated competition. This experience has included:

  • Careful examination of costing methodologies used to establish prices in rate-regulated industries.
  • Research on the demand, cost, and competitive aspects of converging technologies in telecommunications, including wireless and broadband.
  • Evaluation of pricing policies for increasingly competitive telecommunications markets, including appropriate mechanisms for pricing access services to competitors.
  • Analysis of the effects of convergence and growing intermodal competition on whether incumbent firms should be considered dominant in the provision of certain services and the regulatory and antitrust implication of such determinations.

Our experts have participated in numerous telecommunications proceedings before U.S. state regulatory authorities, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, as well as in international venues, such as Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Peru, Australia, Trinidad, and Tobago. We have also provided expert reports and testimony on the reasonableness from an economic perspective of increases in the rates international carriers at Los Angeles International Airport pay for use of terminal space.