Securities Litigation Support Editing and Proofreading Services

Securities litigation turns on written analysis produced by people whose expertise is financial and whose audience is legal. An expert report on damages or market efficiency will be read by opposing counsel looking for a soft assumption, by an opposing expert paid to disagree, and eventually by a judge or jury with no background in event studies. A report that is technically impeccable and impenetrable fails at the last step; one that is readable but loose on method fails at the first. Getting both right is what separates experts who are retained again from those who are not.

We edit what experts, consultancies and litigation teams produce — expert reports on damages, causation and market efficiency, rebuttal and reply reports, event study methodologies and results, materiality and price impact analyses, class certification support material, loss causation analyses, valuation reports for disputes, forensic accounting reports and restatement analyses, deposition and cross-examination preparation material, demonstratives and summary exhibits, declarations and affidavits, and settlement allocation plans and distribution methodologies. Our editors work within your citation conventions, preserve technical content exactly, and check that every figure in the narrative matches the exhibits and appendices it relies on.

The methodology section is where reports are attacked, and the failure is almost always insufficient specificity rather than a flawed method. A report stating that an event study was conducted over an appropriate estimation window invites a challenge that the window was chosen to produce the result. We work on these so each methodological choice is stated with its justification before the results appear — the estimation window with the reason for its length, the index and any industry factor with why they were selected, the confidence level, the treatment of confounding disclosures on the event dates — and so any choice for which a reasonable alternative exists is accompanied by what the result would have been under that alternative. Reports that pre-empt the obvious challenges in this way are markedly harder to undermine, and they read as the work of someone who reached a conclusion rather than someone who was given one.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, and we are used to material under protective order, privileged drafts and work product; we are glad to sign confidentiality undertakings. We are editors rather than lawyers, economists or accountants, and we offer no view on any analysis or conclusion — the substance and its expression as opinion remain entirely yours. What we can do is make the writing precise, consistent and comprehensible to the tribunal that must follow it.