Printed Materials

Case Study: Paragon v Waterloo

Background

The Claimants were appointed as administrators of a company engaged in the production and supply of printed marketing materials. The company had supplied goods to the value of over £600,000 to the Defendant customer who, on the administration, had taken the opportunity to refuse payment alleging that the goods were defective and issued 11 separate counterclaims totalling £11 million.

The counterclaims were predicated on the alleged failure of the goods supplied to achieve the customer response rates which the Defendants claimed they should have.

An expert report was produced by the Defendant’s expert which showed the statistical correlations between the results achieved by the supplied batches of goods and the historical success of other ‘untainted’ batches. The analysis presented appeared to show a significant difference between the batch performances and hence supported the Defendant’s counterclaims.

The Claimant engaged us to assist them to address the expert report and to examine and refute or otherwise quantify the actual level, if any, of any remaining counterclaims.

What did we do?

We reviewed the available evidence on historical success rates and identified a number of weaknesses in the data. These included: inconsistent or incomplete sampling techniques; false statistical inferences; and contradictory evidence. We also reviewed the expert report noting that the analysis was high-level and generally ignored certain key facts.

We brought our expert analysis together in a report which was circulated to the parties and, following an extensive set of expert meetings, the Defendant’s counterclaims were reduced from £11 million to less than £1 million and, on certain interpretations of the data, the counterclaims were no more than £20,000.

How we did it?

We worked collaboratively with the legal team defending the case and took time to professionally understand the strategic issues of the case and the proper interpretation of data.

We were granted access to the Defendant’s historical sales records, which were provided in a database containing over 9 million separate transactions. We compiled this into one single database capable of fast searching and easy analysis.

Using this database: we conducted our own review and analysis of marketing performance over the relevant period; identified inaccuracies in the opposing expert’s extraction of data (which had been conducted by analysing the sales transactions in multiple excel spreadsheets); and showed that the other expert’s conclusions were unsupportable.

Results

As a direct result of our work, report and the points made at the expert meetings, the case settled on terms which were very favourable to the Claim