Economic damages consulting firms — which provide expert analysis of lost profits, business interruption losses, personal injury economic damages, and other financial harm quantifications for litigation — are expanding their use of virtual assistants in 2026 as attorney client demand grows and the complexity of billing and case coordination increases. According to the National Association of Forensic Economics (NAFE), the demand for economic expert testimony in federal and state litigation has grown steadily over the past five years, driven by commercial disputes, class actions, and catastrophic injury cases.
Attorney Billing in the Economic Expert Context
Billing in economic damages consulting is governed by the expectations of attorney clients who must justify expert costs to courts, opposing counsel, and fee-sensitive litigation funders. Bills must be detailed, timely, and defensible — reflecting specific hours spent on data analysis, report preparation, deposition preparation, and trial support. The American Bar Association's model litigation guidelines for expert witness expenses set a high bar for billing transparency.
Virtual assistants in this context manage invoice preparation based on time records submitted by the economic expert, cross-reference hours against engagement letters, prepare narrative billing descriptions, and track outstanding balances across multiple attorney clients. For economics consultants managing five to twenty concurrent engagements with different law firms, this billing function is substantial — and errors carry the risk of client disputes that can damage long-term relationships.
VAs also track retainer draws and replenishment requests. Many economic damages engagements operate on retainer structures that require regular reconciliation and replenishment notices to attorneys. Maintaining this cycle accurately without manual follow-through falling through the cracks is a consistent challenge that structured VA billing workflows solve effectively.
Case Data Collection and Coordination
Economic damages analysis requires extensive data collection from client-side sources: company financial records, payroll data, sales histories, tax returns, and industry benchmarks. Gathering this data from attorney clients and their underlying corporate clients involves multiple rounds of requests, follow-up, and document organization — work that consumes time without contributing directly to the analytical work product.
Virtual assistants manage data collection by sending structured document request checklists, following up on outstanding items, organizing received documents in case management platforms, and flagging gaps in the data set for the economic expert's review. According to NAFE member surveys, data collection follow-up is among the top three administrative time drains reported by practicing economic consultants — a direct target for VA delegation.
For engagements involving publicly available industry data — BLS statistics, Federal Reserve economic releases, or industry association benchmarks — VAs can also handle routine data pulls and file organization, ensuring that the economic expert arrives at the analysis stage with organized inputs rather than a stack of unsorted documents.
Damages Analysis Coordination and Report Support
The production of an economic damages report involves structured coordination between the economic expert, supervising attorneys, and occasionally the plaintiff or defendant's financial personnel. Virtual assistants manage the scheduling and logistics of this coordination, including arranging expert-attorney review meetings, distributing draft reports to authorized recipients, tracking attorney comment cycles, and managing final report delivery logistics.
For deposition and trial preparation, VAs coordinate scheduling with opposing counsel through attorney liaisons, prepare exhibit binders, manage demonstrative exhibit files, and confirm logistics with court reporters — all functions that fall outside the economic expert's core competency but are essential to successful testimony.
Firms looking to build scalable administrative support around their expert economics practice can explore trained professional services VAs at Stealth Agents.
The Financial Logic of VA Deployment
Economic damages experts bill at rates ranging from $250 to $600 per hour or more depending on credentials and market. Every hour an economist spends on billing reconciliation, client follow-up emails, or document organization is an hour not available for billable analysis. If VA support costs $10 to $20 per hour and displaces two to four hours of non-billable administrative work per day, the return on investment is immediate and substantial.
McKinsey's research on professional services operational efficiency consistently identifies expert utilization — the share of professional time spent on revenue-generating work — as the primary leverage point for service firm profitability. Virtual assistants are a direct mechanism for improving that utilization ratio.
Sector Outlook
As commercial litigation volume remains elevated and plaintiff's bar practices continue to grow their use of economic expert analysis, the workload facing economic damages consultants will continue to increase. Firms that build administrative infrastructure capable of scaling with that workload — rather than depending on the economics expert to absorb it personally — will be better positioned to grow their practices and protect expert time.
Sources
- National Association of Forensic Economics (NAFE), Member Practice Survey 2024
- American Bar Association, Model Guidelines for Expert Witness Expenses 2023
- McKinsey & Company, "Professional Services Operational Efficiency," 2024