Michelle D. Herman

Michelle Herman is a Senior Managing Director in the Data & Analytics group at FTI Consulting and is based in Los Angeles. Ms. Herman co-leads FTI Consulting’s west coast Data & Analytics practice. Ms. Herman specializes in complex, data-intensive cases, including government/regulatory investigations, financial/accounting investigations, class actions, bankruptcies, and other cases requiring complex modeling or sharing of information. She has in-depth experience in the design and implementation of complex financial, economic, transactional, and document/image management systems.

Ms. Herman has extensive experience in the areas of database design and management and complex data modeling. She has provided testimony regarding the availability and suitability of trust accounting records, data validation, forensic accounting, and document discovery which depended upon the recovery and analysis of current and historic transactional, financial and accounting data. Ms. Herman has served clients in the public sector and financial services industry.

Ms. Herman’s most notable engagements include assisting one of the largest civil lawsuits against the United States government, involving the alleged mismanagement of individual Indian trust assets spanning more than 100 years. She and her team assisted in the areas of forensic accounting analysis, economic modeling and analysis, data modeling and analysis, and account reconstruction and reconciliation. Ms. Herman and her team assembled data from disparate sources to construct a transactional database of over 175 million records. This analysis required the recovery, conversion, and analysis of current and historical records which were stored in disparate data forms. Ms. Herman also assisted the United States government in evaluating a series of lawsuits surrounding the alleged mismanagement of Native American tribes’ trust assets.

Ms. Herman’s other key engagements include assisting the Army and Air Force Exchange Service with two class action law suits surrounding the management of their propriety credit card products. She assisted with class identification, data extraction and analysis, and financial modeling.  Additionally, Ms. Herman assisted in developing a sophisticated financial and data model for a Fortune 100 bank in one of the largest class action suits brought under California’s Unfair Competition statute, designed a model to calculate actual versus contractual trustee’s fees for another large Fortune 100 bank, and reconciled current and historical trading information across several systems for a large German financial institution.

Prior to joining FTI Consulting, Ms. Herman was a Senior Manager in KPMG’s Forensic Dispute Advisory Services practice for nearly two years. Before joining KPMG, she was a Manager in Arthur Andersen’s Economic and Financial Consulting, where she specialized in litigation support and complex data. Ms. Herman holds a B.S. in business administration from the University of California at Berkeley.