Business Valuation Expert Witness Services

Valuation is the rare expert discipline where the two sides usually produce a single number each and the court picks between them, or splits the difference. That structure rewards defensibility over advocacy. A report with a conclusion at the aggressive end of a defensible range but a fully traceable path from data to number will beat a report with a moderate conclusion the analyst cannot reconstruct on the stand. Judges remember which expert could answer where the discount rate came from.

The decisive moment usually arrives before trial. In a buyout or dissolution matter, the valuation report is the settlement document. Once both sides have credible numbers, the negotiation is over a range rather than over whether the business is worth anything at all, and matters that looked intractable resolve. Where one side's report has an obvious methodological hole — an unsupported marketability discount, comparables drawn from a different industry, a growth rate that outruns the industry indefinitely — that hole prices the settlement.

The West Coast adds a distinct wrinkle. The concentration of privately held technology and life-science companies in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland means valuation disputes here routinely involve pre-revenue enterprises, preferred stock with liquidation preferences, and large option pools. Common stock in those companies is not worth what the last preferred round implies, and allocating value across a complex capital structure requires methodology — an option-pricing or probability-weighted allocation — that a generalist report tends to skip entirely.

California trial courts apply the gatekeeping analysis of Sargon Enterprises v. University of Southern California, a case that was itself a lost-profits valuation dispute. Sargon directs the court to exclude opinion that is speculative or that rests on reasoning the expert cannot connect to the underlying data, and Evidence Code sections 801 and 802 let the court examine the matter the opinion is based on rather than stopping at qualifications under section 720. Valuation testimony is unusually exposed to that analysis, because every input is a choice the expert has to justify.

The regional statutory framework matters as much as the evidentiary one. Corporations Code section 2000 gives the corporation or the majority holders the right to avoid an involuntary dissolution by purchasing the moving parties' shares at fair value, determined by court-appointed appraisers as of the day before the dissolution action was filed — a procedure with its own valuation date, its own standard of value, and its own treatment of discounts. California family law separately distinguishes community goodwill, which is divisible, from personal goodwill attached to the practitioner, and applies the Pereira and Van Camp approaches to apportion the growth of a separate-property business between separate and community effort. Washington is a community property state with parallel characterization questions; Oregon divides property equitably rather than by community property rules, which changes the framing but not the underlying analysis.

Washington applies Frye general acceptance to novel scientific method alongside ER 702, Oregon evaluates expert evidence under the State v. Brown and State v. O'Key framework and OEC 702, and federal matters in the Ninth Circuit apply Rule 702 as amended in December 2023, which made explicit that the proponent must establish admissibility by a preponderance. Dr. Alban identifies the credentialed valuation analyst suited to the matter, confirms the standard of value and valuation date are correctly framed before work begins, and reviews the report against the standard that will actually govern. Where a matter has a medical or life-science dimension, he contributes his own parallel opinion.

Practice notes for each jurisdiction are set out on the California, Washington, and Oregon pages, and the engagement process explains what happens after you make contact.