If you’ve ever had a referral source ask whether you handle Litigation Support and felt your answer was technically true but unsatisfying, you’re in the right place. The path from ‘I can do it’ to ‘I’m the person to call’ is more concrete than it looks.
Written for forensic accountants thinking about how to position around Litigation Support for the next three to five years, not the next quarter.
The forensic accountant’s relationship with Litigation Support usually starts with a defined scope — typically expressed as a series of specific questions the engaging attorney wants answered. Effective forensic accountants spend significant time at intake clarifying the scope, identifying the documents needed, and setting realistic timelines. Engagements that skip this clarity routinely produce work that doesn’t answer the question the attorney actually needed answered.
How Litigation Support engagements begin
Document the intake. Either contemporaneous notes you keep in the file or a follow-up summary email to the client. Litigation Support engagements involve enough small decisions across long timelines that working from memory six months in produces errors.
The intake conversation for Litigation Support matters does most of the work of the engagement. Practitioners who run a structured intake — covering the client’s objectives, the timeline they’re working with, the co-professionals on the case, the data and documents needed, and the form the deliverable will take — produce engagement letters that hold their shape through the matter. Practitioners who run an unstructured intake produce engagement letters that get rewritten or absorb scope creep silently.
The analytical work itself
The pacing of the middle phase depends heavily on third-party responsiveness. Some Litigation Support engagements can complete the middle phase in 30 days; others stretch to four months because a critical document custodian is slow to respond. Practitioners who actively chase third-party documents — rather than waiting for them — keep matters moving meaningfully faster than passive practitioners.
The middle phase of a Litigation Support engagement is mostly about data gathering, analysis, and coordination. The data gathering involves requesting documents from the client and (often) from third parties through subpoenas or formal requests. The analysis involves working through what the documents reveal. The coordination involves keeping the attorney and other co-professionals informed. For deeper reference, see ACFE Report to the Nations on occupational fraud.
Litigation-track Litigation Support work requires different documentation discipline than negotiation-track work. The work product needs to be defensible against opposing-expert challenge, judicial scrutiny, and potentially appellate review. Practitioners who anticipate the litigation track from intake produce stronger work product than those who try to retrofit defensibility after a matter has already turned contentious.
The deliverable
Review the deliverable with a peer before it goes out, especially in your first dozen Litigation Support matters. A senior practitioner or a peer who has done similar work will catch things you didn’t notice — both substantive issues in the analysis and presentation issues that affect how the deliverable lands.
The deliverable for a Litigation Support engagement is the work product everyone will reference for years afterward. It needs to be defensible (your analysis can withstand scrutiny), readable (the client and any non-specialist can understand it), and complete (it addresses what the engagement was scoped to address). The deliverable usually takes 20-40% of the engagement hours; underestimating this consistently produces matters that run over time.
How specific situations change the standard pattern
High-conflict matters require different communication and documentation discipline than cooperative ones. In high-conflict Litigation Support engagements, every communication may eventually be reviewed by opposing counsel or a judge; the practitioner needs to write as if the matter will be litigated, even when it won’t be.
Matters with unsophisticated clients require more explanation, slower pacing, and more deliverable walk-through time than matters with sophisticated clients. Practitioners who run the same engagement structure regardless of client sophistication produce uneven outcomes; calibrating to the client is part of professional judgment.
None of this is shortcut work. The practitioners who own Litigation Support in their markets earned their position the slow way — consistent attendance at the same conferences, careful case work compounding over years, relationships built deliberately.
How VennBoard fits in
VennBoard supports the kind of case-management discipline Litigation Support engagements benefit from: organized case files, integrated communication with co-professionals, deliverable versioning, and the kind of operational consistency that makes the difference between burning out at twenty matters and running a sustainable practice at fifty.
Learn more about how VennBoard fits into a forensic accountant practice focused on Litigation Support at VennBoard.com.
Further reading
Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement