Litigation Consultant, Berkeley Research Group

>> My name is Scott Sternberg and I'm a consultant with Berkeley Research Group and I do litigation consulting. So what that means is we provide economic or statistical expertise to lawsuits and help the legal team who is devising a client determine their best legal strategy based on what the data shows. I primarily work with employment litigation cases. So, for example, you could have a group of employees who claim my employer didn't pay me overtime properly or I missed my breaks and my employer never compensated me for that. So what we're really doing is diving into the data and attempting to determine is that true. Did the company fail to pay them properly? If so, was it an isolated thing that was sort of an oversight or was it some sort of systematic thing that they have in their payroll system that just is not catching instances of times when they should have been paid and they actually were not paid. So then we try to assess, you know, if this went to trial would there be high economic damages and then the lawyers, you know, their goal is really do you want to take this to trial and take our chances and hope for, you know, no damages or do we want to try to settle it because we're not sure how this is going to play out in court. Most of my days are not typical, but an example of a busy day would be I come in, I'm working on something that I was working on yesterday or, you know, the rest of the week, and I get a call, okay, we need to switch cases, swear gears to a different case which may not have been on our plates for the past several weeks or months and there's, you know, one of the worst things about working in a client-based industry is that you're always at the mercy of the client. If the client says I need something, you can't say well, no, you can't have it. You say, sure, I'll get you that as soon as I can and especially when we're dealing with the law and there are different legal deadlines. Maybe the court is requesting that the lawyers provide something right away and so that means we need to provide it even more right away so that the lawyers have a chance to review it. So, I think that that's probably one of the best examples of a busy day where you just come in and you think you're working on one thing, totally have no idea something is about to hit and this, you know, this ideally would happen 9 to 9:30 and sometimes it happens 2, 3, 4, 5 o'clock and hey, I need this by the end of the day and if it's 5 o'clock end of the day, you know, you're probably going to be working until 10 or 11.