Michelle D. Herman

Michelle Herman is an experienced data scientist and forensic accountant based in Los Angeles. With more than 30 years of experience, Ms. Herman has primarily led engagements as an expert consultant, with a primary focus on investigations and disputes involving allegations such as breach of fiduciary duties, fraud and other complex claims. These matters often require the recovery and analysis of large volumes of financial, accounting, operational and human resources data.

Ms. Herman has deep experience conducting complex, data-intensive investigations in response to litigation, internal reviews and government or regulatory inquiries. She has provided testimony before federal and state courts.

Ms. Herman co-leads FTI Consulting’s West Coast Data & Analytics practice and has extensive experience in database design and management and complex data modeling. She has provided testimony regarding the availability and suitability of trust accounting records, data validation and document discovery, and has served clients across the financial services and public sector industries.

Relevant Experience:

• Retained as the Independent Auditor to assess compliance with a court order resulting from a more than 20-year litigation between the U.S. government and a number of large tobacco manufacturers; led a cross-functional team specializing in document review, e-discovery, application development, complex litigation and data analytics that facilitated compliance audits of more than 200,000 retailers
• Led the technical workstream in a comprehensive investigation of a large technology company’s data access polices and determined violations of user data misuse from third parties
• Retained by a large gig economy company to assess and respond to several inquiries and lawsuits brought by federal and state regulators alleging violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”), deceptive advertising regarding expected earnings and other related claims
• Led a forensic investigation into a $590 million Ponzi scheme on behalf of the debtors, supporting the court’s determination and quantifying net claims and potential claw backs
• Assisted the Departments of the Interior and Justice in their defense and settlement of one of the largest civil lawsuits against the U.S. government; involved the alleged mismanagement of more than 500,000 individual Indian trust assets spanning more than 100 years; provided assistance in the areas of forensic accounting analysis, economic modeling and analysis, data modeling and analysis, and account reconstruction and reconciliation; assembled data from disparate sources to construct a transactional database of more than 175 million records requiring the recovery, conversion and analysis of current and historical records stored in disparate data forms