Electrical & Utility Damages

Our forensic electrical engineering analysis investigates electrical failures, code violations, and fire hazards, then quantifies the resulting loss. It works alongside our construction damages, commercial litigation support, and economic consulting and valuation practices. Code and fire-safety analysis references standards from the NFPA.

What we quantify

• Utility-caused fire losses — business destruction, displacement earnings, property and income loss, worked both as individual matters and as claim inventories across large populations.
• Outage and interruption damages — lost production, spoilage, idle labor and the recovery cost of restarting an operation that lost power.
• Infrastructure failure — the economic consequence of transmission, distribution and substation failures for the businesses and households downstream.
• Equipment and product loss — repair versus replacement economics, useful-life adjustments, and the difference between the cost to repair and the value actually lost.
• Energy-project disputes — lost revenue and contract damages in renewable generation, storage and charging-infrastructure matters.
• Personal injury and wrongful death — lost earnings, earning capacity and household services where an electrical incident caused the injury.

Where the depth is

The firm’s single deepest body of work is California wildfire and mass disaster litigation — the Thomas, Woolsey and Camp fires among them. Those matters are electrical at the causation end and economic at the damages end, and they ran at a scale where the analytical problem is not one claimant’s losses but thousands of them, valued consistently and defensibly enough to survive aggregation.

That work is why this practice exists. If your matter is a utility-caused fire, a mass outage, or any event where the same failure produced losses across a large claimant population, the methods are ones we have already had to defend.

What we are, and what we are not

We are forensic economists and forensic accountants. We quantify the money.

We do not offer engineering opinions. Origin and cause, whether equipment failed, whether a design or maintenance practice departed from the standard of care, code and standards compliance — those require a licensed engineer, and we do not give those opinions. If your matter needs one, retain one; we work alongside them and take causation as their opinion establishes it.

Keeping the two separate is deliberate. Damages testimony that also opines on physical causation invites the argument that the economist reverse-engineered the cause to fit the number. Ours rests on the engineer’s opinion, and the report says so.

Who retains us

Plaintiff and defense counsel, insurers and subrogation counsel, and in-house legal teams — a caseload balanced between plaintiff and defense across the firm. In mass matters we are retained both to build claim valuations and to test the other side’s.

What we need to start

For the conflict check, party names only — the case name, the case number if it is filed, and the parties and firms on both sides. In mass matters, tell us at that stage roughly how many claimants are involved; it changes the approach more than anything else does.

Once engaged: the engineering or origin-and-cause report if one exists, the claimant’s financial records — tax returns, financial statements, payroll — and for business losses, enough operating history to establish what the counterfactual would have been. For inventories, the claimant data set in whatever form it exists.

Frequently asked questions

Can you handle a large claimant inventory rather than a single plaintiff?

Yes, and that is a distinct engagement. The problem stops being one valuation and becomes a consistent, documented method applied across a population — which is where sampling, extrapolation and the defensibility of the approach become the whole argument. We have worked wildfire matters this way.

Do you need the cause established before you can work?

Not to start. We can scope and build the damages analysis on an assumed causation predicate, identified as an assumption in the report. What we will not do is supply that predicate ourselves.

Do you work for utilities and their insurers as well as claimants?

Yes. A meaningful share of the work is rebuttal — testing another economist’s model, valuation method or extrapolation rather than building one. Say which role you need at the conflict-check stage.

Can you tell early whether the loss is provable?

Often, yes — particularly for business losses, where the operating history either supports a counterfactual or it does not. That is a short piece of work and better done before the claim is finalised.

What are your rates?

We send the rate schedule and a full CV with the proposal after the scoping call, so you are pricing against a defined scope.