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A certified valuer will listen to your situation and answer any questions you may have, at no cost.
We quantify loss for claimants and defendants in the District Court at Newcastle, the Supreme Court of New South Wales and the Federal Court: lost profit, lost value and lost opportunities, built on a but-for case that still stands after the other side's expert has finished with it.
Indicative valuations from A$799. Certified Summary and Detailed reports from seven business days.
Economic loss in a Newcastle commercial claim is measured by comparing two pictures of the business: the one the records show, and the one that would have existed without the breach. A certified valuer builds that second picture from documents made before the dispute, allows for saved costs and mitigation, and reports the loss as a range.
A commercial dispute asks two things: was there a wrong, and what did it cost? Liability gets the early attention, but the loss figure is what the parties end up negotiating around. In the Hunter that might be a defence supplier near Williamtown whose subcontract ended before the work was done, a Pokolbin vineyard whose grape supply agreement was cancelled ahead of vintage, a franchisee at Kotara who says the disclosure document misled them, or a tenant on Beaumont Street in Hamilton whose lease ended early. Overstate the claim and the defendant gets its best point for free; build it carefully from the records and there is little to knock off.
Every claim has the same soft spot. The accounts record what the business did earn; what it would have earned had the contract been honoured, the representation been true or the departing manager stayed away from key clients has to be rebuilt, and the opposing expert will go to that rebuild first. A sound one follows the pleadings, stays within what the business could really have produced and paid for, and draws on documents written before anyone was in dispute.
The skill set is a valuer's, not an auditor's: you need to know what drives the profit and how it would have behaved if the breach had never happened. Pricing an Upper Hunter mining services contractor for a sale and working out what a terminated maintenance contract cost it are the same exercise seen from different sides. So are valuing a Beresfield haulage business and measuring the freight contract it lost.
We act for claimants and defendants in the District Court, which sits at the Newcastle courthouse on Hunter Street and hears many mid-sized commercial claims, in the Supreme Court of New South Wales, which sits in Sydney, and in the Federal Court of Australia through its NSW registry, also in Sydney. Retail lease disputes are usually mediated by the NSW Small Business Commission under the Retail Leases Act 1994 (NSW) first, and some then go to NCAT, which has a Newcastle registry; a measured early view of the loss helps at both stages. Our valuer works with Hunter clients and their lawyers by video call and phone.
A certified valuer will listen to your situation and answer any questions you may have, at no cost.
Three people shape a loss figure. The judge decides whether the conduct caused the harm, counsel decides which measure the cause of action supports, and the expert turns those decisions into numbers, running each disputed causal assumption as a scenario of its own.
If the model depends on a breach, a start date or a causal link that is not in the pleadings, it fails before anyone examines its arithmetic. Every assumption we use is traced to the pleadings or the letter of instruction, with the reference recorded.
The most persuasive evidence is what the business wrote for itself when nothing turned on it: budgets, board minutes, funding applications to the bank and plans made for other purposes. Historical accounts, management reports, sales by customer and industry data fill the gaps. A projection drafted after the dispute by one party's expert ranks lowest.
An uncertain future calls for more than one answer. We model the realistic scenarios, identify the few inputs that move the result most, and show what remains of the claim if any one of them is rejected.
More sales in the but-for world usually need more people, space, plant, stock or working capital than the business had, and competitors would not have stood still. A claim that ignores those limits is inflated, and the opposing expert will say so first.
In the District Court and the Supreme Court of New South Wales, an expert report is governed by the court's expert evidence rules and the Expert Witness Code of Conduct, under which the expert's duty to the court overrides any duty to the party paying. The Federal Court applies its own practice note on expert evidence. Any report that may be served is written to that standard from the first draft: instructions, facts and assumptions disclosed, reasoning a judge can trace from start to finish, and limits stated rather than implied.
Which measures are available depends on the cause of action, and choosing between them is a matter for counsel. We work to the measure in our instructions and show each step of the arithmetic.
Expectation loss puts the claimant where performance of the contract would have put it, which usually means the profit it would have made. Reliance loss recovers money spent in reliance on the contract or the conduct that has now been wasted; it is simpler to prove and sometimes the better claim when future profit is hard to establish. Diminution in value measures the gap between what an asset is worth and what it would have been worth without the breach. It is the standard measure for an acquired business that falls short of its warranties, and we value that business twice at completion, once as warranted and once as it was, on a single method and a single set of market assumptions.
Loss of a commercial opportunity needs two things proved: what the opportunity was worth and the chance it would have come off, each supported by evidence such as bid records and historical win rates. That is a live issue in the Hunter, where suppliers in the defence precinct around RAAF Base Williamtown and mining services firms bidding for Upper Hunter site contracts tender regularly, and a contract lost through someone else's conduct can found a claim. Restraint of trade claims must distinguish the clients the breach took away from the clients who were leaving in any case, and stop when the protected period ends.
Business interruption asks whether income was lost or only delayed, and whether customer relationships were damaged in a way that needs measuring separately. Where an injured owner or key worker is at the centre of the claim, workers compensation or CTP benefits under schemes regulated by the State Insurance Regulatory Authority (SIRA), with icare (Insurance and Care NSW) managing many workers compensation claims, may already meet part of the loss. The lawyers decide what is recoverable; we make sure the business claim does not count the same dollars twice.
An opposing expert's first read is a hunt for the items below, and every one of them costs less to correct in draft than to defend at trial.
Most loss engagements end up as Detailed reports, because the work is normally served, combed through by the other expert and, if the case runs, tested at trial. The Indicative report fits an earlier moment: before a claim is filed in the District Court or the Supreme Court, or while a lease dispute sits in mediation with the NSW Small Business Commission, when a party needs a private sense of the range to decide whether to sue, defend or offer.
You will find four things at the front of every report: what we were asked, which causal assumptions we adopted, which measure of loss applies and what documents we read. The but-for case is then built in visible steps from named sources, with each assumption separated so it can be attacked on its own. Cost deductions, capacity and mitigation are dealt with in the main text, the double counting test is shown, and the answer is given as a range with its main drivers named. Gaps in the evidence are flagged where the reader meets them.
The certified valuer who signs it meets the opposing expert, helps draft the joint report on what is agreed and what is not, and gives evidence in the District Court at Newcastle or the Supreme Court in Sydney, concurrently with the other expert where the judge directs. If the parties agree on one expert, we can take that role and report to the court instead of to either side. Defendants use the same skills in reverse: a critique that isolates the plaintiff's unsupported assumptions and frames the cross-examination is often money well spent, because an inflated claim tends to fail on its own numbers.
Strip out the single assumption doing most of the work in the but-for case. How much of the claim is left? If your expert has to go away and calculate it, the model was never built to be tested, and the other side will discover that at the experts' conference.
Talk your situation through with a certified valuer before you commit to anything, at no cost.