Ariel Farkas

Ariel’s areas of expertise include antitrust and economic damages, event study analyses in shareholder class actions, and statistical analysis and complex damages. She has advised clients and managed engagement teams in several areas, including complex financial valuation and damages analysis, statistical and econometric analysis, review and analysis of big data, forensic accounting, industry and market analysis, lost profits analysis, financial fraud investigations, complex asset and financial instrument valuation and forecasting, and various other investigation engagements.

Ariel holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from Goizueta Business School at Emory University, with a double major in finance and accounting.

Representative Engagements

• Ariel has led various event study engagements, where she analyzed the share price inflation and associated damages resulting from triggers such as fraud, accounting misstatements, or false allegations. Her experience in event study cases spans across the automotive, retail, health care and pharmaceutical, utilities, and gambling and gaming industries, both within the U.S. and internationally.
• Ariel recently managed a multidisciplinary team of experts in data analytics, securities trading, and statistical analysis in an engagement involving the collapse of a multibillion-dollar investment fund. 
• For the last six years, Ariel she has led a landmark U.S. antitrust case with a multibillion-dollar damages claim on behalf of some of the largest retailers in the country against two major payments industry participants. For this engagement, she collected and analyzed large amounts of data and built complex models in order to calculate the damages incurred by each of the retail plaintiffs in a but-for world. While this engagement originally involved 19 retail plaintiffs, Ariel and her team have since been retained to perform these damages analyses for an additional set of retailers in a subsequent case.
• In a healthcare case, Ariel performed statistical analyses in order to sample, review, and extrapolate overcharge claims and calculate resulting damages.
• Over the last decade, Ariel has managed various engagements advising counsel for trustees of residential mortgage-backed securities in damages litigation brought by investors, which included leading teams investigating hundreds of thousands of loans to ensure that they met underwriting guidelines at the time of origination to assess resulting damages. She has also handled several high-profile financial dispute cases created by the Global Financial Crisis, including the Residential Capital Bankruptcy case, where Kroll (formerly Duff & Phelps) served as an advisor to the trustees of over 1,000 RMBS trusts.