Expert testimony, and where arguments learn to survive attack
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Litigation consulting — developing expert witness testimony in intellectual property, securities fraud and breach of contract. When Jonathan Hare joined in January 1988, a month after graduating from Berkeley, it was called MAC Research, the litigation unit of the MAC Group, and had fourteen people.
It was spun out and renamed Cornerstone Research, and has since become the pre-eminent litigation consulting firm in the world, with hundreds of employees. Hare's own explanation for the growth: people sue each other a lot in business.
Its largest engagement of Hare's period there was the defense of Robert Freeman, Goldman Sachs's head of risk arbitrage — roughly eight million dollars for a single client, and the analysis was Hare's.
Two things came out of it that run through everything since. The discipline of constructing arguments that survive adversarial examination — which is the register the whole corpus is written in, with a defeating condition attached to every claim. And the introductions: it is where he met Mark Wolfson, Myron Scholes and other future Oak Hill partners, years before any of them were connected to his companies.
S-094 adds the case that became a lifelong instrument: the only plaintiff's matter Hare worked there — the UHMWPE knee-implant licensing case, taken on contingency by a Baker McKenzie attorney, in which Hare built the damages model, Robert Hall testified it at maximum parameters, and the jury returned $90 million in compensatory damages against a corporation that had refused a settlement worth the equipment. The lesson — juries punish bad faith; an expert gives them the excuse — has ended every lawsuit threat Hare has received since, including Ceridian's.
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He had read Cox and Rubinstein — the canonical text on options and derivatives — cover to cover, and therefore considered himself qualified to hold a discussion with Myron Scholes.
He was vaguely aware that Scholes had done seminal work in the field. What he had not registered was that Scholes had invented the discipline, with a single equation: the first that allowed options and derivatives to be systematically valued at all. The textbook he had studied existed because of the man he was about to contradict.
He was twenty-two.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
1990–92 — the faculty, the classmates, and the prize he gave up
Open →where those introductions later ledThree rounds, a silver bullet, and the end of Hare's tenure
Open →bought as he was leavingA quarter share, bought as a hedge against not getting into Stanford
Open →cofounder, who hired himCofounder of Cornerstone Research, and an old friend
Open →cofounder, who hired himCofounder of Cornerstone Research, and later its chief executive
Open →the engagementGoldman's head of risk arbitrage — and the analysis that showed the trades did not fit the accusation
Open →the expert of the $90M caseThe expert witness of the $90 million verdict; the damages model was Hare's
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-038The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-039The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-155The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
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