Case Study Example

Projects at LECG are typically in the areas of competition policy, regulation, litigation, arbitration, valuation, intellectual property, transfer pricing, and management consultancy. Our work covers a wide range of industries including energy and utilities, financial services, aviation, communications and media, and sports and entertainment.

Consider the following real-life case example:

Issue: Assessment of Damages due to Price-Fixing
A firm or group of firms is believed to have been abusing a dominant market position by keeping prices high, and then is sued by the firms it has been supplying.

The European Commission investigated a group of specialized manufacturing companies and decided that the companies had been guilty of controlling a cartel in a set of products for about 10 years. The EC levied significant fines on the firms since the product had widespread industrial uses, and the many customers of the cartel initiated private litigation relating to the specific amounts they had overpaid. LECG’s experts were engaged to quantify the damages applicable to these customers on behalf of the largest companies involved in the cartel.

LECG’s role
LECG experts were engaged to determine how prices would have evolved in the industry “but for” the manufacturing price-fixing activity. Supported by an LECG team, and working with the company directly and with public sources, they gathered sufficient data to conduct an econometric analysis. The key thrusts of the econometric analysis were to determine supply and demand factors, and to quantify the overcharges arising from the cartelization of the market. The case required LECG to deploy a wide range of tools in economic theory and quantitative econometric techniques. LECG experts, with help from an LECG team, calculated the degree of price overcharge relating to European economic area markets.

What happened next
This work was used in legal proceedings in connection with the determination of damages. LECG’s application of econometrics to case work is commonplace, and is especially growing in Europe with the increasing acceptance of econometrics by European courts and arbitrators.

During an actual case interview, the interviewer would present you with basic information about a hypothetical case that would have similarities to a real-life case such as this one. You might be provided with background on the relevant parties, claims and counter-claims made or anticipated by the parties, key laws that might be cited, quantitative data, etc.

If this case were a hypothetical one, and being used for interviewing, such information might be presented via an internal memorandum from the European Commission. As an interviewee, you might be asked to do the following:

• Among the laws outlined, describe the most salient laws for determining the level of damages that must be paid (if any) beyond the fines levied.
• Describe how you would determine the appropriate damages.
• Provide a financial estimate of the damages.
• Explain how you would determine the date on which damages began.

There is no one perfect answer for a case. How you go about exploring a case often is more meaningful than your specific conclusions. We want to begin learning about how you organize and prioritize information, how you apply structured problem-solving and decision-making techniques, and how you translate quantitative and qualitative data into unbiased, independent assessments. Just as there is no perfect answer, there also is no one best problem-solving methodology. Your life experience, creativity, quantitative skill, abstract-reasoning skill, and inquisitiveness are among the qualities you may bring to bear on a case discussion.