Some matters genuinely require institutional scale. Many do not. The firm selling you the team has an inherent conflict in telling you which is which.
Start a conversation with Cournot, the Institute’s damages concierge, already scoped to choosing the expert. Select a subject area to prompt it, or describe the dispute directly.
There are two questions in expert selection and firms routinely collapse them into one. The first is intellectual: what discipline does this problem actually require — an industrial-organization economist, a labour economist, a finance academic, a forensic accountant, a valuation specialist, a statistician, or some combination? The second is structural: how much analytical and litigation-support machinery does the matter justify — one outstanding individual, an expert with an analyst, a boutique, or a full economic consultancy? Answering the first question well and the second by habit is how a thirty-million-dollar lost-profits case ends up staffed like an antitrust class action, and how a genuinely data-intensive matter ends up with a brilliant professor and one graduate student who cannot keep pace with discovery. Both errors are expensive. Only one of them is usually noticed.
The discipline, the delivery model, and what has and has not changed about the economics of staffing.
Three separate questions that firms answer as one: who thinks, who computes, who supports the trial.
investigateFour delivery models, what each is genuinely good at, and the conflict in asking a provider which you need.
investigateWhat AI compresses, what it does not, and why the honest version of this argument is narrower than the exciting one.
investigateHow the Institute approaches selection — firm-agnostic, and explicit about its own relationships.
When the binding constraint is throughput rather than thinking. Enormous datasets requiring real data engineering, multiple econometric workstreams running in parallel, compressed schedules, several reports and rebuttals, heavy deposition and trial support, and a trial team that will send sixty requests between Thursday afternoon and Monday morning — that is when institutional infrastructure earns its cost, and a professor with a graduate student will simply be overwhelmed no matter how good they are. A large antitrust or securities class action with hundreds of millions of observations is a clear case. The Institute will say so when that is the answer; a site that never reached that conclusion would not be worth consulting.
When the difficulty is conceptual and the data is manageable. A hard causation question, a novel market structure, a contested counterfactual — these are problems of economic judgement, and judgement is not improved by adding analysts. If the underlying dataset is something one capable quantitative associate can handle with modern tools, and the litigation-support demands are ordinary, then a distinguished academic with modest support may produce work that is as strong or stronger, at a fraction of the cost, with the added advantage that the person who signs the report is the person who did the thinking.
Partly, and the honest version is narrower than the enthusiastic one. The Stigler Center's ProMarket published analysis in April 2026 examining how AI could compress analyst hours in economic consulting substantially, and the major firms are not disputing the direction — Cornerstone has described deploying an agentic research platform across case work, with the notable discipline that outputs are replicated by a professional before litigation use. What that shifts is the labour-intensive middle: data cleaning, coding, document processing. What it does not shift is economic judgement, testimony, or the institutional capacity to absorb a surge. So the question has moved from "how many analysts does this need" to "which parts of this genuinely require human staffing".
Stated plainly, because a recommendation from an undisclosed interest is worth nothing. The Institute's Executive Director, Russ Rosenzweig, cofounded Round Table Group, and where a firm wants a full-service expert search — recruiting, conflicts, contracting, billing and ongoing engagement management — the Institute will refer them there and says so. Where a firm instead wants the analysis before the hire, the Institute performs that itself for a fixed fee paid by the client. The Institute is paid by the lawyer. It does not take a commission, revenue share or placement fee from any expert it names.
Describe the matter. The Institute will help you see what expertise and what scale it actually requires.