Finding the Right Financial Forensic Expert Isn’t Easy Peasy

The Forensic Accounting Deskbook by Miles Mason, Sr. JD, CPA, published by the ABA Family Law Section

Hiring the right forensic accountant takes work. Checking rates, retainer, experience, curriculum vitae, engagement letters, reputation assessment, publications, speaking, and reference checking from other lawyers requires a serious time commitment. Make the wrong referral to a divorce client? Game over! You could get fired or worse, lose the case.

For a much more detailed discussion, see The Forensic Accounting Deskbook: A Practical Guide to Financial Investigation and Analysis for Family Lawyers, Second Edition, authored by Miles Mason, Sr. and published by the ABA Family Law Section.  This updated edition of one the ABA’s most popular resources explains the practice of forensic accounting and business valuation and how to apply it in family law cases. It provides a practice-focused introduction to the core financial concepts in divorce, such as asset identification, classification, and valuation, income determination, expenses, and more.

See Mason’s complete list of the 10 Big Divorce Financial Mistakes.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Tracy Coenen:             So Miles, tell me a little bit about the process that you go through when you’re considering retaining an expert witness.

Miles Mason:              Well, as a trial lawyer what I’m looking for is a right fit, client’s budget, topic, expertise, credentials, I want to try to marry it up. It is very, very hard to always find the perfect expert witness for a particular case. But you’re trying to match it up as best you can.

And sometimes I’m looking for something, an expert witness that the testimony is not going to be complicated. It may be just simply looking at a tax return and saying that the gross income was X percent of something else, okay? Cost of goods sold was X percent of gross income for multi-year period. Maybe something that’s simple, or it could be very, very complicated and we’re going to need to go through a bunch of gyrations. But what we’re looking for is different types of traits, but almost everybody I want needs to be able to take complex concepts and make them sound simple.

Thank you to Tracy Coenen, CPA, CFF for inviting me to join her in this video series. Tracy is a nationally recognized forensic accountant practicing in Milwaukee and Chicago.