The Problem
Two challenges every expert report must survive.
Before a Finding becomes admissible testimony, it has to clear two gates that have nothing to do with whether the analyst's conclusion is right.
Challenge 1
The Daubert challenge.
In Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993), the Supreme Court gave federal judges a gatekeeping role over expert testimony. Before an expert opinion reaches a jury, the judge evaluates whether the underlying methodology is sound. The decision lays out four factors a court may consider.
The four Daubert factors
- Testability. Can the methodology be tested by an independent expert? Is the conclusion falsifiable?
- Peer review. Has the methodology been published in or accepted by the relevant professional literature?
- Error rate. Is the known or potential error rate disclosed? Are uncertainties acknowledged?
- General acceptance. Is the methodology accepted in the relevant professional community?
Opposing counsel files Daubert motions because they work. When a Finding fails the gate, the testimony is excluded — the jury never hears it. In a case built around an expert's reconstruction of damages, exclusion can collapse the entire argument.
The challenge is that Daubert defensibility is not a property a report has at the end. It is a property that accrues — or fails to accrue — through every methodology choice, every cited record, and every phrase in the conclusion. A single conclusory sentence can drop the score. A missing peer-reviewed citation can drop the score. Existing tools surface none of this until a motion is filed.
Quarare's approach: continuous scoring against the four factors as the analyst writes — not a one-time check before filing.
Challenge 2
The foundation challenge.
The Daubert gate evaluates methodology. The foundation gate evaluates the records the methodology relies on. A perfectly reasoned Finding built on poorly authenticated documents is still vulnerable — the records can be excluded under Federal Rule of Evidence 901, and the Finding falls with them.
Foundation challenges are the silent failure point. They look like this:
- A handwritten ledger with no countersignatures on key entries.
- A chain of custody that disappears for eleven years between custodians.
- Bank statements that are clearly secondary copies, with no audit trail back to the originating institution.
- Email correspondence reconstructed from partial backups, with no hash to confirm integrity.
None of these documents are unusable. They simply require a calibrated weighting. Without one, the choice is binary: include and risk exclusion, or exclude and lose the evidence entirely.
Quarare's approach: score every record at ingestion across six provenance factors, before any Finding is written. Weaknesses surface in the document inventory — not in court.
Why now
Why existing tools fall short.
Forensic accountants today rely on three families of tools, none of which were built for evidentiary intelligence.
Spreadsheets
Excellent for analysis, blind to evidence quality. A row in a workbook does not remember where its number came from, how reliable that source was, or whether the conclusion built on it will hold up under cross-examination.
Generic e-discovery
Organizes documents at scale but does not score them. A litigation review platform tells you what exists; it does not tell you what each piece of evidence can carry, or what your conclusion is worth.
Generic AI tools
Powerful for summarization, unciteable in testimony. A general-purpose assistant cannot stand behind a chain of custody, cannot show provenance, and cannot produce output an expert can defend on the stand.
Quarare
Purpose-built for evidentiary intelligence. Scores every record at ingestion. Scores every Finding continuously. Audits every analyst action. Produces reports that stand on a defensible foundation.