Scott Steinberg · Consultant, Analyst and Business Strategist
Class matters impact large groups of individuals. A consultant to 3000+ brands, Scott Steinberg offers input in cases involving all manner of audiences, including but not limited to CPG, online services, AI, social media networks, technology, consumer products, video games and app store matters.
Expert reports, declarations, deposition and trial testimony on legal matters impacting class action clients and law firms.
Certification standards, predominance and typicality are legal matters for the court; our practice covers many areas and supplies the insights that they are argued from.
Whether everyone in a proposed class saw the same thing is answerable from deployment records: release history, feature flags, A/B test assignments, regional variants and staged rollouts all determine who encountered which version.
Testimony establishes what was actually shown to whom across the period, which frequently reveals either more uniformity or far more variation than either side assumed.
Where a claim concerns what users were told, the question is how disclosures were positioned, how prominent they were, and whether that presentation changed during the class period.
Testimony reconstructs the interface as it existed at successive points and characterises what an ordinary user would have encountered at each.
Recurring billing matters examine enrolment disclosure, trial-to-paid conversion mechanics, renewal notice practice, price change handling and the cancellation path available at each point.
Testimony addresses category convention across the period and documents how the implementation at issue operated for the population concerned.
Matters involving in-app spending examine currency bundling and pricing opacity, purchase confirmation design, account controls, refund handling and how randomised reward mechanics were presented.
Testimony explains how these economies were configured and what a purchaser could observe about real-money cost at the point of decision.
Packaging, specification and performance representations reach every purchaser, which makes them common evidence when they were consistent and a variation problem when they were not.
Testimony documents what appeared on packaging, listings and marketing across the period and where the representation changed.
The practical question in most class matters is what the defendant's systems actually retained: transaction records, account histories, telemetry, support tickets and analytics, and at what granularity.
Testimony addresses what those systems can support, what they cannot, and where an inference exceeds what the data will bear.
Class periods often span years during which convention moved substantially. What was ordinary practice at the start may be outside the norm by the end.
Testimony establishes the standard as it stood at successive points, which frequently matters more than the standard as it stands today.
Whether affected people can be identified from existing records depends on what account, transaction and contact data the organisation kept and how reliably it maps to individuals.
Testimony addresses what the records support in practice, including where duplication, shared accounts or thin identity data complicate the picture.
Class matters run on systems evidence spanning years, so scoping which records actually answer the uniformity question early prevents very expensive review of records that do not. Retention is accepted for plaintiff and defense alike.
Written opinions on practices, interfaces, representations, etc. across a class period.
Testimony on how the systems at issue operated and what their records can and cannot establish.
Responsive analysis of uniformity assertions, sampling design and inferences drawn from partial systems data.
Non-testifying assessment of matters relevant to both attorneys and the presiding court.
Scott Steinberg is an analyst, consultant and business trends expert with over 25 years of experience providing management and strategic consulting services to more than 3,000 businesses and brands ranging from startups to government agencies and Fortune 500 firms.
He has testified in sample areas including class actions, intellectual property — copyrights, trademarks and patents — marketing, branding, video games, mobile applications, app stores, online marketplaces, advertising, business, consumer product development, and the growth and monetization of online distribution platforms.
He is the author of over 30 books and has published more than five thousand articles addressing areas including but not limited to marketing, technology, leadership, innovation, advertising, digital transformation, data privacy and social networks. He appears regularly on ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC, and has led seminars and training programs for organizations including Wells Fargo, the PGA Tour, Century 21, Ford, Dell and Procter & Gamble.
His consulting work has been broadly recognized. He has served as a thought leader for the American Bar Association and Corporate Counsel magazine, and has received honors from the International Association for Scholastic Excellence, Fortune, and the 21st Century Icon Awards, among others.
This practice supplies the factual record class questions are argued from: whether an interface, representation or practice was uniform across the period, what the defendant's systems actually recorded, and what industry convention was at successive points. Work covers online services, apps, social media, technology, consumer products, video games and app store matters. Engagements are accepted from plaintiff and defence sides alike.
No. Predominance, typicality, superiority and adequacy are legal standards for the court. This practice addresses the factual predicates those arguments rest on, such as whether the same disclosure was shown to everyone during the period, and leaves the certification conclusion where it belongs.
From deployment evidence rather than assumption. Release histories, feature flag configurations, A/B test assignment records, regional variants and staged rollout logs together determine who saw which version and when. That evidence frequently shows more variation than a complaint assumes, or considerably less than a defence asserts.
No, and the two roles work together. A damages expert builds class-wide models. This practice supplies what those models stand on: what the systems recorded, at what granularity, whether the practice was consistent, and what industry convention was during the relevant years.
Because the records that answer uniformity questions are often the ones nobody thinks to preserve. Feature flag histories, A/B assignment logs, archived interface builds and granular telemetry are commonly purged or aggregated on short schedules, and once gone the question can only be argued rather than shown.
Initial conversations about scope, timing and conflicts are without charge. Helpful detail includes the class period, the practice or representation at issue and any expert disclosure deadline already set.
A conflicts check is run before any substantive discussion. An initial note listing the party names and a one-line description of the dispute is enough to start; please hold privileged or confidential material until the check clears.