Wildfire business destruction: a claim inventory, not a claim
Hundreds of destroyed and interrupted businesses, one model that had to hold per claimant and at scale — with much of the evidence burned along with the premises.
Counsel represented a large group of claimants whose businesses were destroyed or interrupted by a California wildfire. The question was not what a single business lost. It was how to quantify hundreds of losses on a method consistent enough to administer across the inventory, and specific enough to survive scrutiny on any one claim.
Rebuild the but-for baseline
Reconstruct pre-fire revenue and margin from tax returns and surviving records — and, where the records burned with the premises, from regional and industry comparables.
Separate fire loss from market movement
Isolate the effect of the fire from the regional economic trend, so the claim is not credited with losses the market would have produced regardless.
Model displacement, not only closure
Many businesses did not close permanently. Quantify the interruption period, relocation cost, and the earnings path after reopening.
Build for administration
Structure the model so it applies claimant by claimant at scale, with documented per-claimant inputs and a method that produces the same answer in anyone’s hands.
What the fight was actually about
Not the arithmetic. In wildfire matters the evidence of the loss frequently burns with the business — the bookkeeping, the point-of-sale history, the supplier invoices. What survives is a tax return and a memory.
So the contested question is almost never “is this multiplication correct.” It is whether reconstructing a destroyed business’s pre-fire earnings from third-party and industry data is a defensible exercise or a speculative one. That is where the analysis is attacked, and it is where it has to be built to withstand attack.
Why the inventory changes the method
A model built for one plaintiff can afford to be bespoke. A model applied across hundreds of claimants cannot — it has to be consistent enough that the program can administer it, and specific enough that any individual claim still stands on its own record.
Those two requirements pull against each other, and reconciling them is the work.
A method that held per claimant and at scale
Records destroyed with the premises. The analysis stood or fell on whether the reconstruction from third-party and industry data was defensible — not on the damages arithmetic, which was never seriously in dispute.
Parties, jurisdictions and identifying facts are altered or withheld. Methods, data volumes and outcomes are not.
Recognise your case in this one?
Tell us which part. We will tell you what was actually decisive in it.