Invalid Assumptions Doom Expert Damages Opinion
August 21, 2014In this legal malpractice case, the Court rejected the plaintiff’s expert opinion as based on invalid assumptions. The expert opined that the value of sale of an interest in certain oil and gas wells would have been $960,000 greater in April 2008, when the interest should have sold but for a law firm’s malpractice. Among other faulty assumptions, the Court noted that the expert wrongly assumed that (1) the later sale, in September 2008, was a simple asset sale, when, in fact, it involved a partial settlement of a lawsuit; (2) the projections of actual drilling costs, as opposed to actual results, were the proper measure of costs; and (3) that wells would have been drilled at a certain specified rate.
