The Independent Valuer

Why One Independent Expert Beats Two Adversarial Ones — Every Time

Two expert valuers. Same business. Same documents. One says $3.2 million. The other says $1.1 million. Both are qualified. Both are experienced. Both are willing to defend their number in court.

This is not a hypothetical. It is a routine feature of contested commercial and family law matters, and it represents one of the most expensive, time-consuming, and avoidable failures in the litigation process. When two parties each retain their own valuation expert, they rarely get two independent opinions. They get two advocates dressed in expert clothing — and the Court is left to arbitrate between them while the legal costs accumulate and the matter drags.

There is a better structure. It is called a single expert witness. And the difference between that structure and the adversarial alternative is not merely procedural. It goes to the heart of what expert evidence is actually for.

One Expert. One Process. One Number the Court Can Trust.

In many contested matters — particularly in the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia, and increasingly in commercial proceedings — the Court has the power to appoint a single expert jointly, or the parties can agree to one. Under this structure, a single valuer is instructed by both parties (or by the Court), has access to all relevant material, and produces one opinion. That opinion is not written for either party. It is written for the tribunal.

The advantages are significant and largely underappreciated by parties who instruct their own expert as a reflex.

Cost is the first. Two experts means two retainers, two reports, two sets of instructions, two rounds of review by counsel, and — when the matter reaches hearing — two sets of cross-examination. That is before the costs of a concurrent evidence session, where the experts sit together in the witness box and the Court works through their disagreements in real time. For a matter where the business is worth $2 million, spending $80,000 on competing valuations is not a rounding error. It is a material reduction in what each party recovers.

Time is the second. Adversarial expert processes extend matters. Reports are exchanged. Replies are filed. Experts confer and produce a joint report identifying areas of agreement and disagreement. Each of these steps takes weeks. In a matter where a business is operating, uncertainty is not neutral — it delays decisions, depresses value, and prolongs the damage that the litigation itself causes.

But the deepest problem with the adversarial structure is not cost or time. It is credibility. When two experts who are both ostensibly independent arrive at numbers that are $2 million apart, the Court does not conclude that valuation is a subtle and complex discipline requiring careful calibration. The Court concludes, reasonably, that at least one of the experts has allowed their client’s interest to shape their conclusion. The entire discipline is diminished. And the parties — who paid for certainty — find themselves in a credibility contest that neither of them controls.

A single expert witness resolves this. One rigorous process, one set of disclosed assumptions, one conclusion that both parties can interrogate, where neither can credibly claim “it favours the other side”. The Court receives evidence it can rely on. The parties receive a number they can negotiate around, even if one of them does not welcome it.

What I Am — and What I Am Not

I am an independent expert. That phrase carries legal weight in every jurisdiction where I am appointed. It means my paramount duty runs to the Court or the appointing authority, not to the party who engaged me. It is not a courtesy. It is a constraint, and it is the constraint that makes my evidence useful.

I am not your advocate. I am not the person whose job is to find the highest number you can credibly defend, or the lowest number that disadvantages the other side. If that is what you need, you need a different professional — and you should know before we begin that no reputable valuer will provide it. Advocacy dressed as expert evidence is identified quickly by experienced counsel and dismantled efficiently. The damage to your matter is proportional to how far the opinion strayed from independence.

What I can offer is something more durable: a valuation that is methodologically sound, honestly reasoned, and defensible from first principles. That means it will withstand cross-examination. It means opposing counsel will find little purchase. And it means the Court will be able to rely on it — which is precisely what determines its weight.

The Number Might Disappoint You. The Process Will Not.

I ask every client to hold two things in mind before they receive a report.

First: the value of a business is what it is. It is not what it needs to be to fund a retirement, to satisfy a shareholder buy-out expectation, or to make a property settlement feel fair. Value is determined by applying a defensible methodology to the available evidence. The outcome follows the process. When clients approach it the other way — beginning with an expected outcome and working backwards — the expert evidence built on that foundation rarely survives.

Second: disappointment in the number is not evidence that the process was wrong. I have delivered reports where the conclusion was considerably lower than the client hoped. In some of those matters, the opposing valuer’s conclusion was even lower. The methodological integrity of my report — the transparency of my adjustments, the rigour of my comparables analysis, the discipline of my earnings normalisation — meant that when the two experts gave concurrent evidence, my reasoning held. The matter resolved. The client was disappointed in the outcome but trusted the process. That is the correct order of those two things.

What the Process Requires

Independent expert evidence is only as sound as the information it rests on. I will not shade my analysis to protect a favourable picture. But I do need a complete one.

The valuation date is not a detail. It is the epistemic boundary of the entire opinion. Everything I conclude is referenced to a specific point in time. Hindsight is inadmissible — not by convention, but because allowing post-date information would make valuation unprincipled. If the date is disputed between the parties, tell me. I can address multiple dates or provide sensitivity analysis across a range. What I cannot do is work from ambiguity that was never disclosed to me.

The financial record must be complete. Not the most favourable three years. Not the record that omits the loss year or the related-party loan. The complete record. When cross-examination produces material that was not in my brief, I am placed in an impossible position — one that compromises the report, the matter, and any confidence the Court has placed in the evidence. A valuation built on a partial picture is a liability. Provide the profit and loss statements, balance sheets, tax returns, management accounts, and any BAS for the current period. Where the financials include related-party transactions, trust distributions, or owner’s remuneration that does not reflect market rates, tell me. Normalisation is a routine part of the process. Concealment is not.

The purpose of the valuation must be stated precisely. The basis of value changes depending on whether this is a property settlement, a shareholder dispute, a loss of profits claim, or a transaction advisory. Each carries different methodological requirements under the Standards we apply. A valuer who is not told the correct purpose cannot reliably select the correct framework — and a framework selected incorrectly will not survive a methodological challenge.

What I Cannot See — and Why That Matters More Than What I Can

A valuation is only ever a reasoned opinion formed on the evidence available. The evidence is never complete. There are always gaps: records not produced, management representations that cannot be independently verified, forecasts with no supporting analysis, earn-out structures with undisclosed assumptions, or simply the ordinary opacity found in  privately held businesses. The question is not whether those gaps exist. They always do! The question is whether the valuer has identified them, named them, and told the Court what was done in response.

This is where the discipline of special assumptions — defined as assumptions that depart from what could reasonably be expected to exist on the valuation date, or that assume a state of affairs contrary to facts at that date — becomes one of the most important tools available to an independent expert. A special assumption is not a weakness in the opinion. It is evidence that the valuer dug beneath the surface. It is a flashlight pointed directly at the places where the information runs out.

In practice, this means the report will explicitly state: I have been unable to verify this figure independently, and I have proceeded on the assumption that it is as represented. Or: the management accounts contain a material inconsistency that I have identified and addressed as follows. Or: I do not have access to the underlying contracts that support this revenue line, and I have applied a special assumption as to their continuity on the basis that the historical record supports it — but I note that if that assumption is found to be false, the opinion would need to be revisited.

That kind of disclosure is not an admission of failure. It is a trademark assurance by a valuer who genuinely interrogated the material rather than accept it – or worse – did not grasp its significance. It tells the Court precisely where the expert’s opinion rests on firm ground and where it rests on disclosed and justified inference. It is transparent in a way that protects the integrity of the opinion — because nothing was hidden, and the reasoning can be followed and tested.

The alternative — proceeding as if the gaps do not exist, absorbing inconsistencies into the analysis without acknowledgment, and presenting a conclusion of false precision — is the valuation equivalent of shooting an arrow and then rushing up to paint the target around where it landed. It may look like certainty. It is not. And under cross-examination, it will be taken apart, because experienced counsel knows exactly where to find the seams in an opinion that has been dressed rather than reasoned.

A good valuation will reconcile what it knows, explain what it does not know, state what it has assumed in response, and tell the Court what difference it would make if those assumptions prove to be incorrect. That is not uncertainty dressed up as expertise. Special Assumptions represent the expertise you should look for. It is the only form of expert evidence that holds its ground when challenged — because it was never pretending to be anything else.

On Methodology

Methodology is not selected to produce a preferred result. It is selected because it is appropriate to the characteristics of the business, the market participants and the purpose of the valuation.

I will explain my methodological choices transparently in my report. I will explain why I have weighted certain approaches and discounted others. I will address the normalisation adjustments I have applied and why. Where I have considered and rejected alternative approaches, I will say so. That transparency is not a weakness — it is the foundation of defensibility.

If the opposing expert applies a different methodology, I will address that difference when required to do so. The Court is well served by two experts who can each explain their reasoning clearly, acknowledge where they differ, and identify the genuine points of dispute. What does not serve the Court is an expert who cannot explain why they chose their method, or who chose it because it produced the right number.

What This Looks Like in Practice

A well-prepared expert report anticipates the contested ground. If key person risk, customer concentration, personal goodwill, or an unsustainable earnings trajectory are relevant to the business, I will address them — not because counsel asked me to, but because a complete opinion requires it. Proactive treatment of genuine risk factors is not advocacy for the other side. It is intellectual honesty, and it is what makes a report difficult to dismantle.

A report that is silent on foreseeable vulnerabilities is not a cautious report. It is an incomplete one. Silence is not protection. It is an invitation.