Discovery decides which methods are available. Most firms choose the method first and discover the constraint later.
Start a conversation with Cournot, the Institute’s damages concierge, already scoped to data quality & foundation. Pick a starting point, or describe the dispute directly.
A damages methodology is a claim about what can be inferred from a body of records. Change the records and the available methods change with them: before-and-after needs a documented trading history at useful granularity, a yardstick comparison needs data about the comparator, a gain-based measure needs the defendant's revenue and cost detail, and a valuation needs comparable-company or transaction evidence. None of that appears by itself. It arrives through requests made early enough to be answered, which means the practical sequence runs the opposite way to the intuitive one: what you can prove is determined by what you asked for, and what you asked for was determined by a methodology decision often made before anyone thought about it. Firms discover this when an expert says the analysis they would prefer is unavailable on this record.
Choosing a method is choosing a discovery plan, whether or not anyone says so.
Monthly rather than annual financials, spanning enough pre-conduct period to establish a baseline.
Data about the comparator — industry statistics, public filings, or a genuinely similar business.
Defendant-side revenue and cost detail, which must be specifically requested.
Comparable companies or transactions, plus the inputs for a defensible rate build-up.
Transaction-level records across the class, often at very large scale.
What was never kept, was destroyed in the ordinary course, or sits with a third party.
How the Institute approaches the record.
Which methods are open to you — and therefore what the case can be worth.
It is made early, often implicitly, and it determines what can be requested in time. A firm that settles on its damages theory after the discovery cut-off has narrowed its options without noticing.
Broadly, on the theory that narrowing later is cheap and reopening is not. Financial records at monthly granularity rather than annual, covering a meaningful pre-conduct baseline as well as the damages period. Cost detail sufficient to distinguish costs that vary with revenue from those that do not. Contemporaneous budgets, forecasts and board materials, which carry particular weight because they were prepared before any dispute. On the defendant side, revenue and cost data for the relevant products or period if any gain-based measure is plausible. Requesting these does not commit you to a method; failing to request them forecloses several.
Then the available methods narrow, and it is far better to know that in month two than in month nine. A business with no reliable trading history cannot support before-and-after and has to look to yardstick comparisons, projections grounded in something other than its own past, or a gain-based measure that shifts the evidentiary burden onto the defendant's records. Sometimes the honest conclusion is that a rigorous damages case cannot be built, and that is worth knowing before six figures of expert fees are committed rather than after.
Substantially, and it is routinely underestimated. Annual figures can obscure exactly the thing the case is about — a business that grew over a year may have fallen sharply in the month the conduct occurred, and annual data hides that entirely. Monthly or transaction-level records let an expert locate the break, test whether it coincides with the conduct, and distinguish the conduct's effect from seasonality or market movement. Coarse data forces coarser assumptions, and every assumption is something to be challenged.
To a large extent, and this is where firms most often mis-hire. A conceptually difficult question resting on a manageable dataset is well suited to an outstanding individual economist. A conceptually ordinary question resting on hundreds of millions of transaction records is a data-engineering problem before it is an economics problem, and requires infrastructure regardless of how strong the economist is. Establishing the shape and scale of the record early tells you which of those situations you are in, which is a more reliable guide to expert selection than the size of the claim.
Describe what financial records exist. The Institute will help you see which methods are open.