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Why this institute exists.

Who runs it, how it is paid, what it will and will not tell you, and the relationships it discloses before you ask.

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mission

Nearly every dispute reaches a number. Almost nobody is neutral about how it gets there.

A lawyer deciding how to prove damages is surrounded by people with a stake in the answer: consultancies that sell teams, experts who sell hours, and search firms that sell introductions. The one thing rarely available is a disinterested reading of what the case actually requires.

The Economic Damages Institute exists to supply that reading, and to make the first hour of it free. Any lawyer can use the Institute’s concierge at no charge: it asks what happened and what economic harm is alleged, explains which measures the facts could support and what each would demand in records, identifies where such claims are typically attacked, and says plainly what should be secured in discovery before the option closes.

The reference material behind it is organized the way the problem is actually shaped. Areas cover the measures of loss and the methodologies underneath them, what survives an admissibility challenge, and how to match expertise to a matter rather than to habit. It is written for commercial litigators and general counsel, people who are excellent at law and under no obligation to be economists.

What the Institute never does is produce a number. It explains what methodologies exist and what each requires; it does not calculate damages, does not opine on what is legally recoverable, and does not tell anyone what their case is worth. Those are, respectively, an expert’s job, counsel’s job, and nobody’s job before the work is done.

plainly stated

What the Institute is and is not.

The Institute is

A knowledge institution. Plain-language references on the measures of economic loss, the methodologies behind them, the admissibility record, and how expertise should be matched to a matter.
Firm-agnostic. Where a matter genuinely justifies the scale of a large economic consultancy, the Institute says so and helps identify the right individual inside one. A recommendation that a case does not need institutional scale is worth nothing from someone unwilling to say when it does.
Free at the point of use. The concierge and the references cost nothing and require no account.
Explicit about its relationships. The Institute discloses its connection to Round Table Group wherever a referral is offered, not only when asked.

The Institute is not

Not a damages opinion. Nothing here, including concierge conversations, calculates damages or estimates what a matter is worth. Identifying which methodologies the facts could support is not the same as producing a number, and the Institute does not cross that line.
Not legal advice. Which measures a cause of action permits, whether a particular claim supports unjust enrichment, what costs may be deducted, and how prejudgment interest runs are questions of law that vary by claim and jurisdiction. Those belong to counsel.
Not a cheaper alternative to the large consultancies. Analysis Group, Cornerstone, BRG and their peers exist because some matters genuinely require that infrastructure. The Institute is where counsel works out whether this matter is one of them.
Not a party to your matter. Using this site creates no attorney-client or expert relationship, and concierge conversations are neither privileged nor confidential. Do not put privileged material or client identities into it.

How the Institute is paid

The diagnostic is free and stays free. Where a matter has more than one viable damages theory and no obvious answer about who should run it, the Institute prepares a written Economic Damages Assessment: the measures the facts can support and what each would require in data, analogous matters and methodological literature, the resource requirement the matter implies, and named candidates with the reasoning behind each. It is billed as a fixed fee, agreed in writing before any work begins.

The Institute is paid by the client. It does not take a commission, revenue share, placement fee or any other payment from an expert it names. That matters more here than it would elsewhere: an expert whose recommender is paid out of that expert’s billings has been handed a bias question to answer on cross, and the lawyer who retained them inherits it.

The Institute’s Executive Director, Russ Rosenzweig, cofounded Round Table Group. Where a firm wants a full-service expert search, recruiting, conflicts, contracting, billing and ongoing engagement management, the Institute refers them to Round Table Group and says so at the point of referral. Where a firm instead wants the analysis before the hire, the Institute does that work itself. The two are different products, and counsel should be told which they are being offered and by whom.

We publish all of this because the Institute’s entire value is a disinterested reading of what a matter requires, and that claim is worth exactly as much as the evidence behind it.

leadership

Leadership.

Announcement · August 2026

Russ Rosenzweig named Executive Director of the Institute

Russ Rosenzweig was named Executive Director of the Economic Damages Institute in August 2026. He was one of the pioneers of the expert witness industry and has decades of experience helping clients understand complex technical disputes and connecting them with the right experts and knowledge bases.

He founded the first expert witness search and referral firm in 1993 and led it for three decades, connecting thousands of attorneys, insurers and companies with specialized experts. His clients have included most of the largest law firms in the United States. That firm is Round Table Group, and the Institute discloses the relationship wherever a referral is offered.

The reason this institute is run from that history is that the underlying problem is the same one. Thirty years of matching specialists to disputes is thirty years of watching the wrong expert get hired for the right reasons, a familiar name, a prior engagement, a habit of purchasing, and of learning that the best person for an unusual matter frequently sits in a field nobody thought to search.

B.A., Northwestern University · M.B.A., University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Executive Director Russ Rosenzweig on why damages is not one field, how a dispute maps to the right model, and what Cournot does (9 minutes).

Read the full transcript

Lightly edited for readability.

Welcome to the Institute for Economic Damages. My name is Russ Rosenzweig, and let me tell you a bit about myself and this unusual and fascinating institute.

I have been working in the world of expert witness referrals and introductions for over 30 years. My whole career has been connecting litigators with very specialized experts. I've literally worked on thousands of matters over 32 years, and you name it, we've probably helped a client find a specialized expert. Across all those matters, all those years, there's been one pattern that has never really changed. A good half of the expert requests that we receive are for economic damages experts. And I've always loved when that happened. It's secretly my favorite topic that a lawyer can pick when they call upon us for an expert witness.

I think there are personal reasons why I'm so fascinated with this question of economic damages. It's the turning point in a dispute, where we're not talking about the meritoriousness of the claim, we're talking about how much it's worth. As an entrepreneur and a business guy, I've always been intrigued by what's at stake. What is this dispute really worth in dollars and cents?

Maybe I'm so fascinated because I studied the topic in college. I went to Northwestern and I majored in a cool, very specialized major called Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences, and I paired that with economics. I also went on to business school and studied quantitative finance at the University of Chicago, which some say was where the science of economic damages was born.

I never really became one of those economists who do the economic damages work that I admire so much. I was only an A-minus, B-plus student, so all my friends and classmates who were the A students went on to become professors, and I decided to become the entrepreneur and just hire those people instead. But those are some of my favorite people in the world: the professors and other economists and experts who can do this work, who can perform the damages analyses. I've been fascinated by their models my whole life, because my whole major in college was different kinds of quantitative models and figuring out what kind of situation they apply to.

The main purpose of this video is to tell you what three decades of helping lawyers with their economic damages requests have taught me. The biggest mistake that litigators make, and the biggest mistake that litigation financiers also make, is treating economic damages as one field, as one specialty. "Find us a damages guy," they'll tell me. But there is no such thing as an economic damages person. There are actually 118 distinct damages models at my last count. Lost profits is not a business valuation. Reasonable royalties are not event studies. A measured mile is not a life care plan. Each one of these 118 economic damages models fits a very particular kind of dispute, a very specific kind of case. It demands particular records and gets attacked by opposing experts in a very specific way.

The rigor, the secret to winning when it comes to economic damages, is this mapping: connecting your dispute to the correct damages models and, of course, finding the perfect and most appropriate experts to help you, who have spent their whole professional careers working on the specifically relevant damages model. That's what we have built here at the Institute. Our institute articulates, expresses and makes known publicly all 118 of the models. It tells you what each one measures, what it requires in advance, and how it gets attacked and overturned.

My favorite part of the Institute, really the reason I agreed to become the Executive Director of it, is that we have built an AI concierge named Cournot, for the first economist to treat these questions as mathematics rather than opinion. We've built this concierge with great passion, skill, technology, rigor and vigor. It's much better than any chatbot you've ever engaged with. Do not run your economic damages questions by a generic old chatbot. Run them by Cournot instead. He's trained on all 118 models, he's trained on every mathematical equation I learned in my MMSS program and in all my finance classes, and he'll walk you through the situation you're facing. He'll understand the dispute and the complaint, and he'll tell you which models your facts can actually support. It's not going to compute the damages for you, but it will do something even better. It's not going to tell you exactly what your case is worth, but it'll tell you which model you need to employ to get that answer.

And behind the scenes, when you've figured all that out, when you're ready for the expert: well, if nothing else in the world, I know every economist who works on every single one of those 118 damages models, and I think that's where we can add a lot of value. The Institute will help you figure out the kind of model you need. And then there is our expert witness company, Round Table Group, which I co-founded 32 years ago. I even recently wrote the book about our exploits in the wonderful world of expert witnesses and damages calculations. So it's kind of a match made in heaven.

The Institute is really passionate about helping you figure out what economic damages models you need to employ. We have a ton of content, all kinds of great articles and citations about this wild and wonderful, intellectually interesting world of economic damages. We're only paid by clients, never by experts, and it's our passion to help you ensure you have the best and most qualified experts working on the correct and most appropriate economic damages model for your situation.

So go ahead, come give it a try. Describe your dispute to Cournot and let's see what your facts can support. I hope you enjoy the Institute.

the network

The specialists behind the answers.

Damages problems rarely sit inside one discipline, and the request that reaches a search almost never names the right one. A distribution dispute may need an industrial-organization economist rather than a general damages practitioner. An earnings claim needs a labor economist. A contested enterprise valuation is its own field with its own credentials. Reconstructing books is forensic accounting; class-wide extrapolation is statistics; and a market-structure question may need an academic who has never testified but has published on precisely that market.

The Institute draws on a working network built over thirty years across those fields, economists of several stripes, forensic accountants, valuation specialists, statisticians, and industry specialists who pair with them. Experts are engaged matter by matter and remain independent. The Institute’s role is to work out what the problem actually requires, and then to find the right person for it, including inside a large consultancy where that is the answer.

An advisory council of economists, valuation specialists and litigators is being convened and will be named here.

standards

The rules this site holds itself to.

No numbers, ever

The Institute does not calculate damages or estimate what a case is worth, not a figure, not a range, not an order of magnitude. It explains what each methodology measures and what each requires. That line is written into the concierge’s operating rules and holds on every conversation, including when a visitor asks directly.

The legal line

What is economically measurable is not the same as what is legally recoverable. The Institute describes the measures; whether a cause of action permits one is counsel’s question, and the answer varies by claim and jurisdiction.

Relationships disclosed at the point of use

The connection to Round Table Group is stated where a referral is offered, not buried on a page nobody reads. A recommendation from an undisclosed interest is worth nothing.

Willing to recommend the expensive answer

Where a matter’s data scale, schedule or trial-support load justifies a large economic consultancy, the Institute says so. A site that only ever concluded “you don’t need the big firm” would be marketing, not analysis.

Figures carry dates and sources

Exclusion rates, adoption figures and market observations are period-specific. Every figure on this site names what measured it and when, and none of them says “currently”.

Corrections

Errors, once known, get fixed. If something on this site is wrong, tell the Institute and it will be reviewed and corrected.

Work out the measure before you retain anyone.

Start free with Cournot, the Institute’s damages concierge, or talk to the Institute directly.

talk to the Institute

Cournotdiagnostic · not a damages opinion

Happy to explain. I can tell you what the Institute covers, how it is paid, or help you scope the damages question in front of you. I won't calculate a number, and I won't tell you what is legally recoverable.