2019 Vault Rankings
“Great people”
“Esprit de corps, abstract, technical concepts in daily work, quality of colleague brains/personalities”
“Strong compensation”
"Growing bureaucracy"
"The unpredictable hours”
"Little access to equity partnership”
"Collegiate, dedicated to community."
"Best-in-class econometrics."
"Friendly."
"Rates are way too high."
Bates White is a mid-sized consultancy specializing in advanced economic, financial and econometric analysis. The company's professional staff—among them economists, econometricians, financial analysts, and IT specialists—help law firms, corporations, and government entities address complex matters that require sophisticated problem solving and deep empirical analysis.
Co-founders Charles Bates and Halbert White set the bar as high for excellence as they did for diversity. They created a culture where bright minds from diverse backgrounds work together to build strong, collaborative relationships with clients, within teams, and in the community." The firm is uniquely focused on the cultivation of diversity within its ranks. In the first decade since its founding in 1999, it established a diversity-inclusion council that tests, implements, and evaluates initiatives aimed at the heterogeneous widening of the staff and corporate culture, and ensures that all employees, regardless of their differences, have opportunities to learn, develop and contribute to the firm's success. Employees come from an array of ethnicities and backgrounds, having been recruited from many different institutions and an alphabet soup of academic fields, including biology, business administration, chemistry, economics, engineering, finance, mathematics, physics, political science, and statistics. Their linguistic capabilities include Armenian, Cantonese, Czech, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Kannadu, Korean, Mandarin, Nepali, Portugese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
Data gurus
Bates White specializes in complex data-intensive cases in the areas of healthcare, life sciences, mergers, monopolization, collusion, product liability, and financial securities litigation. The firm pays meticulous attention to uncovering relevant data, and its experts are skilled at delving into issues using sophisticated analytical techniques. In particular, the firm has developed a number of robust, proprietary databases containing information on such items as employment, epidemiology, insurance claims, product pricing, and financial records from public sources such as Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the US Census, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In addition, the firm has extensive experience analyzing substantial amounts of company-specific information from transactional and financial data as well as business records spanning multiple industries, especially airlines, chemicals, electronics, pharmaceuticals, payment cards, and retail products. Bates White is widely recognized for its ability to collect and analyze vast amounts of data and has an IT infrastructure that enables it to quickly and efficiently respond to client requests for analyses.
Experts at antitrust and beyond
Bates White is at the forefront of applying economic theory and empirical methodologies to address issues that arise in the antitrust analysis of class certification, damages, mergers and acquisitions, monopolization, and collusion. The firm's hallmark approach to conducting business is to develop a deep understanding of relevant industry, factual, and legal contexts to support opinions with sound economic theory and rigorous empirical analyses that withstand intense scrutiny. Today, the firm has a team of more than 60 PhD professionals who advise clients on case development and strategy, assess and analyze the relative strengths of economic arguments, and determine optimal strategies for discovery, motions, trial preparations, and settlement. In addition, Bates White has been a dominant market leader for more than a decade in asbestos litigation and valuation as well as in False Claims Act litigation. More recently, the firm has earned an outstanding reputation for its expertise in mortgage-backed securities. Antitrust remains the largest practice area, but the firm also has recognized experts in environmental product liability, healthcare and life sciences, energy, and finance.
IN THE NEWS
June 2017
Bates White named #1 mid-size workplace in DC for 2017
In June 2017, Bates White was named the #1 Top Workplace in Washington, DC, for mid-size companies by The Washington Post. The award was based on employee feedback from more than 300 organizations in the DC area regarding company values, leadership, and work environment. In their feedback, one of the areas that Bates White employees highlighted was the firm's community program, which allows them to propose and implement activities to support their favorite nonprofit organizations.
July 2017
Bates White analysis contributed to DOJ clearance of DuPont-Dow merger
Bates White was engaged on behalf of E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Co. (DuPont) to examine the competitive effects of its proposed merger with Dow Chemical Company. The Bates White team provided economic analysis regarding the proposed transaction to agencies in multiple jurisdictions, including the United States, Europe, Canada, Brazil, and China. Bates White experts prepared and presented analyses on possible divestitures, among other things, before the Department of Justice, to address issues regarding competition resulting from the merger. The DOJ cleared the merger with limited divestitures.
Throughout 2016 and 2017
Firm supports music service providers in numerous royalty matters
Bates White has performed extensive work on matters involving music royalties, presenting analyses and testimony before federal courts, the Copyright Royalty Board, and the Canadian Copyright Board. Bates White is at the forefront of working toward solutions to challenges posed by changes in music technology. Working on behalf of companies including Pandora, Music Choice, Stingray Digital, Sirius XM, and National Public Radio, the firm's experts have assessed royalty rates and provided analyses of the impact of royalty structures, evaluated licenses and determined appropriate comparators, and used formal bargaining frameworks to explain why interactive webcasters that displace record sales pay higher royalty rates.
July 2017
Bates White's expert opinions and testimony supported Dentsply's successful challenge to a class action trial
Dentsply was accused of misleading and deceptive labeling of an ultrasonic scaler, a device that dentists and hygienists use to clean teeth. Plaintiffs, comprising a group of periodontists and dentists, claimed that the product breached the express warranty claims due to the potential for bacterial formation in the scalers' water lines. On behalf of the defendant, Dentsply, Bates White's expert testified on economic issues associated with Dentsply's challenge of class certification, including ascertainability of the class and reliability of class-wide damages methodologies. The Court denied class certification, determining that the common issues did not predominate, and that the damages were not provable with common evidence, citing Bates White's testimony in support of all these points.
Throughout 2016 and 2017
Bates White's expert testified regarding damages to compensate trust holders from faulty home loans
Bates White's expert testified on behalf of the plaintiff, Mastr Adjustable Rate Mortgages Trust, in a dispute with UBS over the handling of residential mortgage-backed securities. The Trust alleged that UBS failed to repurchase mortgages that breached the contractual standards (representations and warranties), which resulted in significant financial losses for the Trust. Bates White's expert testified in court that the Trust was harmed at the time the loans were sold to the Trust because the price paid would have been lower if the loan characteristics had been accurately disclosed and that the damages incurred were more than $2 billion as a result of UBS failing to repurchase the breaching loans. After trial, the court appointed a special master to determine the specific loans to be repurchased and that effort is ongoing.
1300 Eye Street, NW
Suite 600
Washington, DC 20005
Phone: (202) 408-6110
Employer Type: Private
Founder & Chairman: Charles E. Bates, PhD
2017 Employees (All Locations): 220
Washington, DC (HQ)
Antitrust and Competition
Communications and Media
Energy
Environmental and Product Liability
Finance
Healthcare and Life Sciences
Intellectual Property
International Arbitration
Labor and Employment
Transfer Pricing and Tax