| Our staff and experts have in-depth expertise in valuation issues and applications, including discounted cash flow models, comparable company/comparable transaction methodologies, option pricing, and other advanced techniques. | We approach valuation matters using sound finance and economics principles applied to the circumstances of each case. |
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Stuart C. Gilson
Steven R. Fenster Professor of Business Administration,
Harvard Business School,
Harvard University
Stuart Gilson is an expert in corporate restructuring and valuation. He has deep expertise in bankruptcy and financial distress issues, credit and financial statement analysis, and corporate transactions—including business valuation in M&A settings.
Professor Gilson has provided expert testimony in numerous matters, including multiple trials. He has addressed such topics as corporate restructuring; asset and business valuation; M&A; solvency; fraudulent conveyance; and substantive consolidation. He has consulted on solvency and valuation issues in a variety of industries, such as education, energy (including alternative energy), finance, healthcare, insurance, retail, technology, and transportation.
Professor Gilson’s research and consulting focus on the operational, financial, and legal strategies that companies use to revitalize their business, improve performance, and create value. He is the author of the book Creating Value through Corporate Restructuring: Case Studies in Bankruptcies, Buyouts, and Breakups, which he developed from a class he has taught for the last twenty years in Harvard’s M.B.A. curriculum.
Professor Gilson has written more than eighty Harvard Business School case studies and teaching notes used in business schools throughout the world. He has also taught extensively in Harvard Business School’s Executive Education programs and received multiple academic research and teaching awards. Turnarounds and Workouts magazine has recognized Professor Gilson as one of the top ten outstanding bankruptcy academics.
Professor Gilson’s research is published in leading academic and practitioner journals and cited by national news media. His work has received several honors, including the prestigious Graham and Dodd Award from the CFA Institute. He was an associate editor of Financial Management and the Journal of Corporate Finance.
Professor Gilson has also served on the advisory and corporate boards of several for-profit and nonprofit organizations and has provided expert advice on bankruptcy law reform in the U.S. and internationally.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Amy P. Hutton
Professor of Business Administration,
Carroll School of Management,
Boston College
Amy Hutton is an expert in securities, financial statement analysis, corporate governance, and business valuation. Her research focuses on corporate disclosure, capital market accounting, and the role of financial intermediaries in capital markets.
Professor Hutton testifies and consults on class certification, price impact, damages, and financial accounting issues in a variety of litigation and regulatory investigation matters. She has assessed questions of valuation, solvency, and factors contributing to financial distress in the context of corporate bankruptcy.
As a result of her research, Professor Hutton was named to the Congressional Review Board, opining on the Security Industry Association’s “best practices for equity research.” She won the American Accounting Association’s inaugural Distinguished Contribution to Accounting Literature Award for her co-authored article “Causes and Consequences of Earnings Management: An Analysis of Firms Subject to Enforcement Actions by the SEC.”
Professor Hutton was an editor for the Accounting Review and continues to serve as a referee for several leading peer-reviewed accounting and finance journals. She has held faculty appointments at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and Harvard Business School.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Frederick G. Van Zijl
President, RVZ Strategic Advisors;
Former Managing Director, Fortress Investment Group;
Former Head of U.S. Leveraged Finance, Barclays Capital;
Former Managing Director, Goldman Sachs
Rick Van Zijl has more than thirty-five years of experience as a financial services professional. Mr. Van Zijl has held senior roles at leading global investment banks, where he led high-profile transactions. He also served as an investor at a major hedge fund. As an expert witness, he has addressed valuation, access to capital markets, solvency, and leveraged finance, among other issues. His industry experience includes financial institutions, industrials, media, quick service restaurants (QSR), retail, and telecommunications.
Mr. Van Zijl has arranged and invested in customized debt and equity structures to finance buyouts, growth, acquisitions, recapitalizations, and restructurings. He has underwritten scores of debt capital market transactions, and has been involved in all stages of debt issuance, including origination, structuring, and syndication. Mr. Van Zijl has deep experience with leveraged loans, high-yield bonds, bridge financing, and mezzanine and distressed debt. His experience includes leading the debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing for the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and working on such notable restructuring transactions as Xerox and Solectron.
As president of RVZ Strategic Advisors, Mr. Van Zijl consults on topics related to private equity and credit financings in the insurance, lease finance, and asset management industries. Previously, as a managing director at Fortress Investment Group, he evaluated and underwrote investment opportunities in distressed assets, in the specialty finance, media, and infrastructure industries.
Mr. Van Zijl founded and headed the leveraged finance business at Barclays Capital, where he oversaw all noninvestment-grade credit origination and private equity and credit investing in the United States. In that role, he also chaired the firm’s Americas Credit Committee and served on the Americas Investment Banking and Global Investment Committees. Before joining Barclays, Mr. Van Zijl was a managing director at Goldman Sachs, with responsibility for all due diligence, structuring, underwriting, and approval processes for subject transactions in the leveraged finance group.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Douglas J. Skinner
Sidney Davidson Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting,
University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Douglas Skinner is a leading authority on financial reporting and disclosure, capital markets, corporate finance, and valuation. An experienced expert witness, Professor Skinner has testified on numerous corporate finance–related matters, both in deposition and at trial. He has evaluated loss causation, damages, market efficiency, and price impact.
In his research, Professor Skinner addresses a range of subjects related to corporate finance, financial accounting, and corporate governance, including the capital market effects of corporate disclosures and financial reporting. He has assessed various factors that affect corporate disclosure choices, the role that manager incentives play in financial reporting, and the determinants of firms’ payout policies.
Professor Skinner’s articles have appeared in leading accounting and finance journals, including the Accounting Review, the Journal of Finance, and the Journal of Financial Economics. He coedits the Journal of Accounting Research and was previously coeditor of the Journal of Accounting and Economics. He has received several best paper awards, including the Jensen Prize from the Journal of Financial Economics and the BlackRock Prize from the Review of Accounting Studies. His research has also been cited in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times.
Honored multiple times for excellence in teaching, Professor Skinner teaches graduate (M.B.A. and Ph.D.) courses that cover financial accounting, managerial (cost) accounting, financial statement analysis, corporate finance, and empirical methods in accounting research.
Professor Skinner is a professorial fellow in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne. Before joining the University of Chicago, he served for over a decade as the KPMG Professor of Accounting at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.
Professor Skinner is an independent trustee of and audit committee chair for Harbor Funds, Harbor Funds II, and Harbor ETF Trust, an actively managed mutual fund and exchange traded fund (ETF) complex.
Valuation Capabilities
Cornerstone Research consults in matters involving business valuation for public or privately held companies. We have worked on matters related to mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings, private placements, spin-offs, hostile-takeovers, financings and going-private transactions.
In these contexts, we have addressed valuation issues using discounted cash flow models, comparable company/comparable transaction methodologies, option pricing, and other advanced techniques. We carefully consider available market evidence, including the contemporaneous actions of market participants and trading data, as a check on our assumptions and conclusions. Cornerstone Research also has experience with valuation issues in the context of entire fairness disputes and appraisal matters in the Delaware Chancery Court and other venues.
Our consultants and experts have expertise in the valuation of goodwill and intellectual property. Combined with our expertise in securities, we provide our clients with practical approaches to the valuation of specific assets, including patents, trade secrets, product lines, operating divisions, and subsidiaries.
Cornerstone Research’s valuation expertise encompasses matters arising from corporate restructurings, such as reorganizations, bankruptcies, solvency and credit rating opinions, divestitures, and buyouts. We also have experience in assessing the impact of a fraudulent conveyance and market and policy factors on a firm’s value or ability to operate as a going concern.
Cornerstone Research has expertise in the valuation of warrants, options, debt instruments, credit derivatives, and convertible and preferred securities. We have also evaluated specific interests such as minority shareholder stakes in both public and private firms.
Our consultants and experts have evaluated noncompete agreements, technology development agreements, joint venture agreements, and supply and purchase agreements using techniques such as Monte Carlo simulations.
Our valuation experience spans an array of industries, including financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, energy and infrastructure, manufacturing, metals and mining, oil and gas, professional services, real estate and construction, and others.
Featured Cases
Selected Professionals
Our staff consultants contribute expertise in economics, finance, accounting, and marketing, as well as business acumen, familiarity with the litigation process, and a commitment to provide outstanding support.
Featured Publications
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