Scott Steinberg · Consultant, Analyst and Business Strategist
Competition cases run on economic models, and those models are only as good as the industry facts underneath them. Who actually competed with whom, what buyers treated as a substitute, how distribution really worked. A consultant to 3000+ businesses and brands, Scott Steinberg supplies that factual layer alongside consulting and trial testimony.
Expert reports, declarations, deposition and trial testimony on relevant market evidence, substitution behavior, platform conduct, distribution restraints, entry conditions, industry history and more.
Get the market facts an economist's model rests on, and hire top testimony consultants to help fill in the blanks you need for legal matters. Sample coverage:
Before an economist runs a substitution test, someone has to establish which products were realistically in play. Participants themselves answer that question every day in strategy documents, competitive win-loss records and pricing decisions made against named rivals.
Testimony assembles that contemporaneous record, which frequently draws a boundary neither the complaint nor the defense had assumed.
Whether buyers actually switched, and what it took to make them, is observable from churn records, procurement processes, multi-homing behaviour and how purchasers ran their own comparisons.
Testimony describes real switching behaviour in that market rather than theoretical substitutability, and identifies where the two diverge.
Allegations that a platform favoured its own offerings require establishing how ranking, placement, defaults and access to functionality actually operated, and whether treatment of first-party and third-party participants differed.
Testimony documents observable platform behaviour over the period and the commercial significance of any differential.
Exclusive dealing, most-favoured-nation provisions, category exclusivity and minimum commitment structures are ordinary commercial tools whose competitive significance depends entirely on context and coverage.
Testimony addresses how such arrangements are customarily used in the category and what share of distribution the terms at issue actually foreclosed.
Bundles are common in technology and consumer markets, so the question is rarely whether products were sold together but whether the components were separately available and separately wanted.
Testimony addresses category bundling convention, standalone demand evidence and how the packaging at issue compared to what competitors offered.
What it actually takes to enter a market is a factual question: capital required, distribution access, technical dependencies, network effects and the practical difficulty a customer faces in leaving an incumbent.
Testimony documents entry attempts that occurred, what became of them, and what switching genuinely cost customers in that market.
Allegations about predatory, discriminatory or coordinated pricing require understanding how prices were actually set in that industry: what list price meant, how discounting worked, and what pricing signals were routinely public.
Testimony addresses pricing practice convention and characterises the conduct at issue against it.
Competition cases are stories about how a market got where it is, and both sides tell one. The factual record of who entered when, what succeeded, what failed and why is assemblable from contemporaneous sources.
Testimony supplies that chronology from trade coverage, product releases, analyst material and documented commercial history.
Competition matters may need commercial history assembled from trade press, product records and contemporaneous documents, which takes longer than any other part of the work. Instructions are taken from either side, and from agencies.
Written opinions on market boundaries as participants understood them, competitive conditions and conduct in context.
Testimony on how the industry actually operated, which economic models assume rather than demonstrate.
Responsive analysis of market definitions, substitution assumptions and characterisations of commercial practice.
Non-testifying assembly of industry history, competitive records and commercial context for counsel and economists.
Scott Steinberg is an analyst, consultant and business trends expert with over 25 years of experience providing management and strategic consulting services to more than 3,000 businesses and brands ranging from startups to government agencies and Fortune 500 firms.
He has testified in sample areas including intellectual property — copyrights, trademarks and patents — patent infringement, marketing, branding, video games, mobile applications, consumer product development, and the growth and monetization of online distribution platforms.
He is the author of over 30 books and has published more than five thousand articles addressing areas including but not limited to marketing, technology, leadership, innovation, advertising, digital transformation, data privacy and social networks. He appears regularly on ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC, and has led seminars and training programs for organizations including Wells Fargo, the PGA Tour, Century 21, Ford, Dell and Procter & Gamble.
His consulting work has been broadly recognized. He has served as a thought leader for the American Bar Association and Corporate Counsel magazine, and has received honors from the International Association for Scholastic Excellence, Fortune, and the 21st Century Icon Awards, among others.
The factual layer economic analysis depends on: which products participants themselves treated as competing, how customers actually switched, how distribution and platform rules operated, what entry really required, and how the market developed over time. Instructions are accepted from plaintiffs, defendants and agencies alike.
No, and it should not be presented as doing so. Econometric analysis, market power quantification and damages modelling are an economist's work. This practice supplies the industry facts those models assume, and the two roles are strongest when they are clearly separated and each stays inside its competence.
Firms document their competitive world continuously in strategy decks, win-loss analysis, pricing decisions made against named rivals and product roadmaps responding to specific competitors. That contemporaneous record is direct evidence of which products were realistically in play, and it frequently cuts against the boundary either side has proposed.
Observable platform behaviour: how ranking and placement operated, what defaults applied, what access third parties had to functionality the platform used itself, and whether treatment differed measurably between first-party and third-party participants over the relevant period.
Because the commercial history these cases turn on is assembled rather than requested. Trade coverage, archived product documentation, analyst reports, competitive intelligence files and platform rule versions all have to be located and dated, and that work does not compress well against an expert disclosure deadline.
Initial conversations about scope, timing and conflicts are without charge. Helpful detail includes the relevant industry, the conduct alleged and the years in dispute, plus any expert disclosure deadline already set.
A conflicts check is run before any substantive discussion. An initial note listing the party names and a one-line description of the dispute is enough to start; please hold privileged or confidential material until the check clears.