S. Litigation, Economics, and Statistics

According to a recent LexisNexis white paper, 96% of hiring partners believe that newly graduated law students lack practical skills related to litigation and transactional practice. Dealing with experts in the fields of economics and statistics is essential to modern complex litigation. The course is 2 credits and will cover fundamental economic and statistical concepts and how they are used in litigation. No mathematical or economic background is required.

Economic and statistical evidence plays an increasingly large role in a variety of practice areas, including antitrust, bankruptcy, contracts, products liability, employment discrimination, voting rights, securities law, and many others; for example, it played a central role in much of the mortgage backed securities litigation from the financial crisis to today as well as in the recent no poach case brought against Apple, Google, and other technology companies, and in a staggering variety of cases where class certification is sought.

Attorneys working on cases like these collaborate with their own experts to present economic statistical evidence and also must grapple with competing analyses from opposing experts. Doing this effectively requires a baseline level of economic and statistical knowledge. However, the focus of the class will be on the way in which the law grapples with those ideas, rather than those ideas themselves. The course will include mock depositions and discussion of some specialized civil procedure topics, such as Daubert and Frye standards.