More details to this question:
I am self employed accounting consultant. My laptop was stolen from a hotel I stayed at. Front desk receptionist let the thief into my room when I was out and thus my laptop and cloth were stolen. I called police (have Police report).Now I am suing responsible party for the theft. My biggest loss was the information inside my laptop: clients records, financial analysis I performed for clients, excel financial models I developed etc. My question is - how to calculate the value of the information that was inside my laptop? Not the software I had installed on that laptop (I have receipts for that), but the value of my projects, tools I developed, clients records I had etc? Or legal system does not take this kind on things into consideration?
1 ANSWER
One methodology might be to estimate the hours you spent putting together the proprietary information you lost and multiply that by your customary hourly rate of compensation. If you're looking for a more sophisticated model, and one which will yield a higher number, there are experts available who can come up with a methodology to value the proprietary information you lost, and testify about it. However that doesn't necessarily mean that you will be able to recover that amount. A court may consider the valuation to be too speculative to be used as evidence. I wonder, did you ever value the laptop for insurance or any other purposes? If, in applying for homeowner's insurance for example, you valued the laptop at $500, for example, you may be bound by that valuation now (assuming that the laptop contained all the information you lost at the time you valued it.)
Answered on Oct 01st, 2014 at 9:01 AM