Scott Steinberg · Consultant, Analyst and Business Strategist
Testifiying and consulting services for law firms on boards of directors, fiduciary duty, risk management, shareholder disputes, transactions and more. A consultant to 3000+ startups, government entities and Fortune 500 companies, Scott Steinberg addresses oversight, reporting and more.
Expert reports, declarations, deposition and trial testimony on corporate governance, boards, technology, cybersecurity and digital risk oversight, information flow to boards, diligence practice, disclosure of technology risk, and governance program adequacy, among other areas.
We cover myriad areas ranging from fiduciary duty and transactions to board of directors, shareholder matters, and technology and business risk oversight as a matter of corporate practice. Fiduciary duty standards, securities law compliance and director liability are legal questions that law firms are tasked with covering.
Boards oversee cybersecurity, data, artificial intelligence and platform dependency risks that few directors have operating experience with.
Sample work looks at oversight structures comparable organizations maintained for risks of that type and period, and what the board here actually had.
Oversight quality depends on what reaches the board: how risks were summarized, what was omitted, whether dissenting views survived the reporting chain and how much time was allocated.
Testimony can cover areas like reporting practice for organizations of that size and sector and what the materials show about information adequacy.
Acquisitions and major technology commitments require diligence proportionate to the exposure, and disputes examine what was examined and what was assumed.
Testimony addresses diligence practice for transactions of that scale and where the process at issue fell short of it.
How technology and operational risks were characterized externally raises questions about consistency with what was known and discussed internally.
Work looks at disclosure practice convention for risks of that type without offering securities law opinions, which belong to counsel and specialist experts.
Organizations maintain policies, committees, assessment cycles and control frameworks whose existence is easy to demonstrate and whose operation is not.
Testimony addresses whether a program functioned as documented and how it compared to what comparable organizations maintained.
When something goes wrong, questions concern who knew, when, how quickly it moved upward and whether escalation thresholds were followed.
Testimony addresses escalation practice and reconstructs the reporting timeline from available records.
Between board and operations sits an executive layer whose responsibility for identifying and reporting risk is frequently the actual issue.
Testimony addresses management accountability structures and what executives in comparable roles customarily owned.
Governance expectations have moved considerably, particularly around fiduciary duty, IT and cybersecurity risk, so practice must be assessed against the applicable period.
Testimony establishes the baseline from published guidance, sector convention and comparable organizations in the same window.
Board materials, committee records and reporting packages accumulate across years and multiple systems, so scoping what actually needs review is substantial early work. Any party may instruct.
Written opinions on oversight practice, information adequacy and governance program comparison.
Testimony on what boards and executives customarily received and asked about risks of that kind.
Responsive analysis of oversight adequacy assertions and characterizations of governance practice.
Non-testifying review of board materials and reporting packages, plus discovery scoping.
Scott Steinberg is an analyst, consultant and business trends expert with over 25 years of experience providing management and strategic consulting services to more than 3,000 businesses and brands ranging from startups to government agencies and Fortune 500 firms.
He has testified in sample areas including intellectual property — copyrights, trademarks and patents — patent infringement, marketing, branding, video games, mobile applications, consumer product development, and the growth and monetization of online distribution platforms.
He is the author of over 30 books and has published more than five thousand articles addressing areas including but not limited to marketing, technology, leadership, innovation, advertising, digital transformation, data privacy and social networks. He appears regularly on ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC, and has led seminars and training programs for organizations including Wells Fargo, the PGA Tour, Century 21, Ford, Dell and Procter & Gamble.
His consulting work has been broadly recognized. He has served as a thought leader for the American Bar Association and Corporate Counsel magazine, and has received honors from the International Association for Scholastic Excellence, Fortune, and the 21st Century Icon Awards, among others.
Corporate governance, fiduciary duty, boards of directors, shareholder disputes, technology and business risk oversight and more as a matter of corporate practice: what boards and executives customarily received, what diligence transactions required, how escalation worked and whether governance programs operated as documented.
Boards now oversee cybersecurity, data, AI and platform dependency risks that most directors have no operating background in, and the question of what information they should have received about those risks is one industry and technology expertise helps answer.
Some might do so by looking at what comparable organizations in the same sector and period maintained: committee structures, reporting cadence, the depth of materials provided, escalation thresholds and how much time was allocated to the risk. It is a benchmarking exercise supported by documentary evidence rather than a normative judgment.
Sample items would be board and committee minutes, reporting packages and pre-reads, risk assessments and registers, escalation and incident documentation, diligence files from relevant transactions, and management reporting to executives. These accumulate across years and multiple systems.
Yes, at the board oversight layer. The enterprise AI practice covers procurement, deployment governance and automated decision systems in operational detail. Matters concerning AI specifically may use either or both.
Initial conversations about scope, timing and conflicts are without charge. Helpful detail includes the organization type, the risk or decision at issue and the period involved, plus any expert disclosure deadline already set.
A conflicts check is run before any substantive discussion. An initial note listing the party names and a one-line description of the dispute is enough to start; please hold privileged or confidential material until the check clears.