Tribunal de commerce francophone de Bruxelles - Patrinvest v. SA Ageas

Ms. Pinheiro has an extensive background in quantitative analysis and data science, which she has applied to various practice areas, including traditional and decentralized finance, intellectual property, biostatistics, and antitrust. In finance, she focuses on cases involving allegations of market price manipulation, misleading communications, excessive mutual fund fees, and mortgage-backed securities litigation. In particular, she has been retained by the US Department of Justice, regulatory agencies, banking institutions, and market exchanges to consult, advise, and testify on matters involving allegations of spoofing and price manipulation, as well as corresponding detection approaches. Her recent work has included the valuation of large portfolios of cryptocurrency assets and the analysis of the market microstructure of digital assets, reflecting her long-standing interest in the field, including early Bitcoin mining experience and certification as a Bitcoin Professional through the CryptoCurrency Certification Consortium. Ms. Pinheiro has also applied survey analysis and statistical modeling to various intellectual property cases, including patent disputes among smartphone manufacturers, copyright tariff setting for musical works, and patent infringement in the pharmaceutical industry. She has extensive experience analyzing clinical trial, registry, and insurance claims data for both litigation and research purposes and has published manuscripts on pharmacoeconomic issues. Her work integrates traditional economic analysis with cutting-edge applications of AI, from evaluating machine learning models in litigation to using generative AI to support the review of large datasets. In the antitrust field, she has acted as an expert and supported other experts in class certification and price-fixing matters involving a wide range of industries, including online search engines, computer chips, liquid-crystal display (LCD) panels, airline ticketing services, gaming, and grocery stores. Ms. Pinheiro has also authored expert reports and testified on questions relating to the modeling and calculation of royalties and damages.

Prior to joining Analysis Group, Ms. Pinheiro served as executive director of the finance group of CIRANO, where she conducted applied research projects in collaboration with private and public partners, including work on hedge funds, style analysis, credit and operational risk, and the development of integrated risk management tools for practical applications.

Dr. Royer applies a broad range of quantitative tools to address client needs in data science, statistics, HEOR, finance, intellectual property, competition policy, and antitrust cases in the United States, Canada, and the EU. His recent work includes predicting the potential future onset of rare or undiagnosed conditions with machine learning models; predicting whether patents would be considered essential to technological standards if challenged in courts; valuing patents in the communications industry; evaluating damages related to product defects; analyzing investment guidelines in securities lending suits; addressing allegations of monopolization in major antitrust cases involving high tech firms; and supporting many academic experts on mutual fund market timing and excess fee cases. In addition, Dr. Royer has conducted extensive academic research and coauthored books and papers on topics such as using new AI advances in HEOR; predicting treatment resistance in tuberculosis, using machine learning algorithms in propensity score models; measuring the impact of ESO backdating on shareholders’ wealth; analyzing mutual fund pricing; analyzing antitrust limit pricing; valuing private investments for hospitals in Canada; determining the impact of hypertension therapies on mortality; and comparing unemployment compensation in different countries.

Dr. Van Audenrode is an expert in data analysis and econometrics, labor economics, antitrust and competition policy, and public economics. He has consulted to clients - including law firms and government agencies - in Canada, the US, and Europe. Dr. Van Audenrode’s work includes developing a methodology to value desktop software; he also developed expertise valuing goods as varied as restaurant franchises, executive stock options, or smartphone features. His recent work in public economics includes evaluating the economic rent from hydroelectricity to the Canadian economy and the value of logging rights on the ancestral territory of a Canadian First Nation. In the area of labor economics, his work has included filing an expert report assessing fair compensation for Quebec provincial judges and Quebec prosecutors and advising Quebec’s commission on pay equity. Dr. Van Audenrode has filed expert reports in courts in the US, Canada, Belgium, Germany, France, and the Netherlands, and has testified in Canada and the US. He recently filed a report with the Amsterdam Court of Appeal in support of the settlement reached between Ageas and claimant organizations in the Fortis case, the largest settlement ever reached through the Dutch Collective Settlement Act (WCAM). Dr. Van Audenrode’s scientific research and articles have been published in numerous peer-reviewed academic journals and trade journals. He is a coauthor of the book The Mutual Fund Industry: Competition and Investor Welfare, and is a frequent presenter at industry and academic conferences.

*Marc Van Audenrode srl