Free Consultation
Book a Free Consultation
A certified valuer will listen to your situation and answer any questions you may have, at no cost.
Lost profit, diminution in value and lost opportunity quantified for claimants and respondents in the Commercial Court, the County Court of Victoria and the Federal Court, on a counterfactual built to be tested.
Indicative valuations from A$799. Certified Summary and Detailed reports from seven business days.
To quantify economic loss for a Melbourne dispute, the expert builds the position the business would have been in without the conduct complained of and measures the gap to what actually happened. Causation and the legal measure of loss are instructed by counsel; the expert prices that loss as profit, not revenue, allows for mitigation, and shows a range.
Every commercial claim has two questions. Did the other party do something wrong, and what did it cost? In the disputes we see across Melbourne, from a distribution agreement terminated in Laverton North to a franchise in Dandenong or a Docklands tenancy cut short, the second question is where the settlement is made or lost. A claim with obvious liability and an inflated figure is easy to resist. A modest, evidenced claim is hard to walk away from.
The work turns on the counterfactual. What actually happened is in the accounts. What would have happened without the breach, the misleading representation or the departed manager has to be built, and that construction is what the other side's expert will attack. It has to match the case as pleaded, respect the capacity the business really had and rest on documents that existed before anyone was in dispute.
Measuring loss is closer to valuing a business than to auditing one. The expert needs to understand where the earnings come from, what drives them and how they would have moved in a world where the breach never occurred. The discipline that values a Cremorne software business for a sale or a South Melbourne wholesaler for a shareholder buy-out is the same discipline that measures the damage done to either.
We prepare quantum reports for claimants and respondents in the Commercial Court of the Supreme Court of Victoria, the County Court of Victoria and the Federal Court, review the opposing expert's report in a consulting capacity, and take part in conferences of experts, joint reports and concurrent evidence.
A certified valuer will listen to your situation and answer any questions you may have, at no cost.
Whether the conduct caused the loss is for the Court, and which measure of loss is open is for counsel. The expert's work sits on top of those decisions: it quantifies the loss on the causal assumptions instructed and, where those are contested, runs the numbers under each alternative so counsel is not stranded if the Court prefers a different path.
The strongest foundation is what the business itself expected when nothing had gone wrong: budgets, board papers, bank submissions and forecasts prepared for other reasons. Historical accounts, management reporting, customer-level revenue and industry data then fill out the picture. A projection built after the event by an expert engaged by one side is the weakest evidence of all.
A model that assumes a different breach, a different start date or a different chain of cause and effect from what has been alleged fails before the arithmetic is examined. The expert works from the pleadings and the letter of instruction, and the report says which assumptions came from where.
Extra revenue in the counterfactual usually needs extra people, space, stock or funding the business did not have, and competitors would have responded to it. A model that ignores those limits overstates the loss and hands the opposing expert an easy first question.
Where the displaced future is uncertain, the report sets out scenarios and shows which inputs move the figure, so each assumption can be tested on its own and the conclusion does not fall over if the Court rejects one of them.
A report for the Supreme Court of Victoria, including its Commercial Court, or for the County Court of Victoria must comply with the Form 44A expert witness code of conduct under Order 44 of the Supreme Court (General Civil Procedure) Rules 2015 (Vic); a report for the Federal Court must follow that Court's expert evidence practice note. Both demand an overriding duty to the Court, disclosure of instructions, facts and assumptions, reasoning a reader can follow and a plain statement of any limitation. We write every quantum report to that standard, whether or not it is ultimately served.
The cause of action determines which measures of loss are open, and that is counsel's call. The expert applies the instructed measure and makes every step of the calculation visible.
Expectation loss is the profit the claimant would have earned had the bargain been kept, the normal measure in a contract claim. Reliance loss is expenditure incurred on the strength of the conduct and now wasted; it is easier to prove and is sometimes the wiser route where counterfactual profit is too speculative to carry. Diminution in value is the difference between what an asset is actually worth and what it would have been worth absent the breach. It is the typical claim after a business purchase in which the warranties proved false: the business is valued twice as at completion, once as represented and once as it was, on the same method and the same market assumptions.
Loss of a commercial opportunity has two components, what the opportunity would have been worth and the probability it would have come off, and both need evidence such as tender histories and past win rates. Business interruption asks whether revenue was lost outright or only delayed, and whether the disruption did lasting damage to customer relationships that must be measured on its own. Restraint of trade claims must attribute loss to the breach rather than to customers who would have left regardless, and run only for the period the restraint would have protected the business.
A reviewing expert looks for these first, and each is far cheaper to fix before service than to explain afterwards.
Quantum reports are prepared to be served, picked over by the opposing expert and, if the matter runs, tested in the witness box, so the Detailed report is the usual instrument. Before proceedings are issued, though, a party often wants a private read of the likely range to decide whether to sue, defend or make an offer.
The report states the instructions, the causal assumptions adopted, the measure of loss applied and the documents relied on. It assembles the counterfactual step by step from identified evidence, isolates each assumption so it can be examined on its own, shows how the lost revenue was costed, deals with capacity and mitigation in the body rather than a footnote, tests explicitly for double counting and presents the result as a range with its drivers named. Evidence gaps and limitations are stated where a reader will see them, not buried in an appendix.
The certified valuer who signs the report confers with the opposing expert, prepares the joint report that records what is agreed and what is not, and gives evidence, including concurrently with the other expert, if the matter goes to trial. For a respondent the same skills run in reverse: a review of the claimant's report that identifies the unsupported assumptions and the questions worth putting is often the most cost-effective engagement of all, because an inflated claim tends to collapse under its own arithmetic.
If the Court rejects the single assumption in this counterfactual that carries the most weight, what is left of the figure? An expert who has not isolated the assumptions cannot answer that, and the answer is exactly what the opposing expert and the Commercial Court will be looking for.
Talk your situation through with a certified valuer before you commit to anything, at no cost.