Advocating/defending a damages claim when there is too little or too much information: experiences from investment arbitrations and post-M&A disputes

Presentation

The robustness of a damages claim depends crucially on the availability and reliability of the underlying evidence. But, more often than not, there are significant challenges with such underlying evidence. For example:

• How do you quantify damages when there is a lack of relevant contemporaneous information and/or the reliability of such information is questionable? Taking the example of investment treaty arbitrations, the alleged breaches can date back many years such that the underlying assets/companies no longer exist and there is very little to no contemporaneous information. Is it still possible to construct a reasonable counterfactual scenario and present a robust damages claim?

• How to filter out noise if there is too much information? Taking the example of post-M&A cases, parties and their financial advisors are likely to have prepared various valuation documents throughout the transaction. How much weight should be placed on these documents given the preliminary nature of some of these documents and/or the underlying motivations of parties at the time to under or overvalue the asset?

Join us at Quinn Emanuel’s Paris office to hear from leading practitioners on how to deal with the challenges of too little or too much information when assessing a damages claim.