TEA.14.2

Description

Since the first listed credit damage and interference with credit expectancy case in 1844 (Mechanics’ Bank against Gorman), the legal profession and those experts in the legal profession responsible for quantifying the damages from such a tort have largely overlooked a real discussion of this topic.  While consumer legislation and problems regarding the preemption rule in the Equal Credit Opportunity Act have a small degree of legal research (Sanders & Cohen, 2004; Conrad, 2006), the existing literature from economic experts on credit damage comprises the null set, with no papers published until 2014 in either the Journal of Legal Economics, the Journal of Forensic Economics, or The Earning’s Analyst.  This paper creates a fictional case of Stan Laurel v. 1^st Street Bank that allows the economic expert to see, step by step, the means for interpreting credit damage or credit expectancy events, and translating these events into dollar losses that will meet the standard of reasonableness and avoid the pitfalls often responsible for dismissal of either the economic testimony or the entire case itself (Climo, 2014, “Seven Things”).  This article presents the road map an economic expert may be looking for when taking on a new credit damage or credit expectancy case.