Correlation Isn't Enough — You Need a Defensible Link
Revenue dropped after a defamatory post went up — but revenue drops for a lot of reasons, and opposing counsel will point to every one of them at deposition and at trial: seasonality, market conditions, pricing changes, competition, macroeconomic factors. A credible business loss analysis has to isolate the impact of the defamatory content specifically, using data and timing, not just the fact that two things happened around the same time. This is precisely the kind of causation gap that a Daubert or Frye challenge targets, and I build every damages analysis anticipating that challenge from the outset.
In matters where I've reviewed opposing experts' damages theories as a rebuttal witness, the most common weakness is exactly this: a damages number derived from simple before-and-after comparison without addressing the alternative explanations a jury or judge will naturally consider. I structure my own analyses to close that gap explicitly rather than leave it for opposing counsel to exploit.
Building the Analysis
That includes establishing a clear before-and-after timeline anchored to when the content was published and when it was actually discoverable (which isn't always the same date — a post that sat unindexed for weeks before appearing in search results has a different harm timeline than one that was immediately visible), comparing revenue and customer metrics against prior periods and, where available, comparable businesses or industry benchmarks, and explicitly accounting for other factors that could explain the change.