Jones & Lamb LLP was founded on the principal of challenging ourselves and the status quo to be the best practitioners we can be. We are really excited to introduce ourselves and our new boutique firm, specializing in financial litigation support and business valuations.
Mark grew up on a small town Saskatchewan grain farm. After stops in Saskatoon to attend university at the University of Saskatchewan and articling in Red Deer, Alberta, Mark has lived in the greater Edmonton area for almost twenty years. Mark has been a Chartered Professional Accountant for over 20 years and a Chartered Business Valuator for approximately 15 years. The last 17 years of Mark's career have been exclusively in financial litigation support and business valuations.
Justin is a Chartered Professional Accountant and Chartered Business Valuator. Over the past 7 years Justin has been working exclusively in financial litigation support and business valuations, and has been in public practice for a total of 11 years. An interesting fact about Justin is that he actively farms with his family. Justin strives to bring the work ethic and creativity associated with farming to Jones & Lamb LLP.
Jones & Lamb LLP was born out of a desire to be innovative. A personal mantra of ours is that there’s always a better way if you’re willing to look for it and invest in it. We believe our use of technology, programmatic solutions and data science is what makes Jones & Lamb LLP truly innovative. Innovation is a mindset. For us, that mindset is to strive each day to learn something new and to improve on something from the previous day.
This innovation applies to our main areas of focus, which are Expert Reports in the areas of:
We formed Jones & Lamb LLP with a goal of creating value through innovation and that mission statement is more than simply a catchy tag line. We went back to the drawing board and asked ourselves if there is a better, more efficient way to perform the underlying calculations. Our aim is to take advantage of technology where it is most efficient thereby enabling us to focus on the big picture and tackle the challenging task of making the complex appear simple.
Instead of being bound by excel and spreadsheets, we’ve taken a step back and rethought how we can provide our clients with a more dynamic, flexible product. We are committed to a continuous development approach, which is very conducive to programmatic modelling.
As an illustration, we have created custom programmatic functions for use in the quantification of damages. By way of example, we utilized these functions to model Future Loss of Income damages. However, rather than simply model damages we extended the concept to use a web interface that is recognizable and easily usable (i.e. dropdowns, sliders and web-based controls). The damage quantification modelling is summarized on one page such that the user simply makes their selection for each of the three parameters for Without-Accident Income and the same for With-Accident Income. This method is designed to provide immediate feedback.
The simplicity of the interface hides the inherent complexity of the task. The reality behind this relatively simple example is that there are 1,155 permutations [21 income options x 5 growth options x 11 retirement options = 1,155] for each of the with-Accident and without-Accident scenarios.
Therefore, behind the scenes, there are over 1.3 million discrete scenarios [1,155 x 1,155 = ~1.334 million] as well as thousands of associated tax return calculations, contingencies and discounting calculations.
The complexity of lots of moving parts that are inherent to these types of matters and calculations does not preclude the ability to demonstrate the matter in a relatively digestible manner and in a visual way that seeks to assist in understanding the key assumptions.
The analogy that we think of is the Sears Wish Book versus Amazon. The Wish Book is a great piece of nostalgia, but ultimately it was simply a stack of paper that comes with limitations in being able to navigate it quickly and effectively. Our approach is to take a (virtual) page from Amazon and web technologies to supplement the way we do things.
We note that we are actively developing a web application damage quantification model which is expected to be available to clients in the coming months. If you are interested in access when it is available, please contact us at info@joneslamb.ca.
