Litigation Support is the kind of work that rewards practitioners who treat it as a multi-year investment rather than a one-week project.
For business valuation professionals who have decided they want to do more of this work and are looking for an honest map of the territory rather than a marketing piece.
Business valuation engagements involving Litigation Support typically run 60-120 days from intake to deliverable. The intake phase identifies the assets being valued, the standard of value applicable (fair market value, fair value, investment value), and the effective date. Practitioners who get these elements wrong at intake spend the rest of the engagement working off the wrong foundation.
Get the engagement letter right
For Litigation Support matters, define the deliverable at scoping. Will you produce a written report? A memorandum? An oral presentation to the case team? A draft document for negotiation? The same matter with a different deliverable is functionally a different engagement; pretending the deliverable will ‘become clear as we go’ produces worse outcomes than naming it upfront.
The engagement letter should specify what’s not in scope as clearly as what is. Litigation Support engagements often sit adjacent to areas the client will assume are covered — tax questions, custody questions, investment questions — that aren’t. Naming these explicitly at scoping eliminates the most common source of mid-engagement misunderstanding.
Keeping the case file usable
A good Litigation Support case file separates the engagement-management documents (engagement letter, scoping notes, communication log, billing records) from the case-analytical documents (records received, analyses, drafts, deliverables). Keeping these distinct reduces the cognitive overhead of finding what you need and makes year-over-year improvements to your templates easier to extract.
Case-file discipline matters more in Litigation Support than in general practice because the matters are denser, the third-party records are more complex, and the matter timelines are usually longer. Practitioners who run organized case files complete matters faster, defend their work more effectively if challenged, and produce reusable templates from each engagement.
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 case team and how to run it
The protocol for coordination matters. Some matters require frequent multi-professional calls; others require occasional written updates; others require near-silence between the business valuation pro and other professionals on the case. Set the protocol at scoping with the client and the other professionals so nobody is confused about who’s expected to do what. For deeper reference, see AICPA Statement on Standards for Valuation Services.
When co-professionals on a case have different views about the right analytical or strategic approach, the business valuation pro’s role is to do their own work well and present their conclusions clearly, not to relitigate every disagreement. The attorney or client makes the final strategic call; the business valuation pro’s job is to make sure the analytical inputs are sound.
Ongoing learning that compounds
Conference attendance compounds over years. Practitioners who attend the same family-law conference annually develop both substantive depth (the sessions accumulate) and relational depth (the same colleagues show up every year). The first year produces little; the fifth year is where the network and the knowledge become genuine assets.
Reading the trade publications that cover Litigation Support matters more than most practitioners give it credit for. Thirty minutes a week, sustained across a year, produces a working sense of where the field is moving. Practitioners who do this find themselves citing relevant developments in client conversations and case strategy; those who don’t fall behind quietly.
How the closing affects the next referral
How a Litigation Support engagement closes affects the next several referrals more than how it opens. Practitioners who send a clean closing letter — recapping what was delivered, confirming any open items the client should know about, formally concluding the engagement — produce stronger ongoing relationships with both clients and referral sources than those who let engagements trail off ambiguously.
Some Litigation Support engagements end without producing the outcome the client hoped for. Closing those engagements well — being honest about what the work produced and why — matters more than closing the successful ones. The client may not feel great about the outcome, but they’ll remember that you were straight with them, which produces referrals over time even from disappointing matters.
If you’re considering Litigation Support as a focus area and you want one concrete commitment to make: pick the upcoming family-law conference closest to you and commit to attending every year for the next five years.
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.
For business valuation professionals ready to see how VennBoard supports Litigation Support engagements, visit VennBoard.com.