After reviewing the plaintiff expert’s opinion and invoice and payment documents related to plaintiff’s defense costs for the covered period, I found discrepancies that the expert did not fully document.
In summary, certain information upon which plaintiff’s expert relied in reaching his conclusions were inaccurate and/or insufficient in the following areas:
• There were a number of instances in which the invoice or payment information summarized in an appendix of the expert’s report was inconsistent with the actual hard copy documents. If the discrepancies I noted were incorporated into the expert’s analysis, his loss calculation would decrease by $69,001.
• There was a total of $251,420 in vendor invoices and $86,998 in insurance payments missing from the expert’s appendix spreadsheet and not found in the expert’s documentation. This suggests that the expert’s analysis may not be comprehensive.
• In computing the total reimbursement payments, the expert included an additional amount of $199,605, which appears to benefit the insurer. However, he provides no documents or details as to where he got this number or explanation of how it was computed.
• In his opinion letter, the expert assumes that the plaintiff paid all the defense costs for which the plaintiff seeks reimbursement from the insurer. However, he only “confirmed” $6.21 million out of a total $16.84 million allegedly paid out by the plaintiff to various vendors.
Due to the aforementioned discrepancies, I cannot attest to the accuracy of the plaintiff expert’s assessment of economic damages in the specific areas noted in this report. Of most concern is the expert’s assumption that all defense costs ($16.8 million) were paid directly by plaintiff. In my opinion, the due diligence performed in that area was insufficient to conclude that the plaintiff paid 100% of the defense costs.