Heather Koo

Heather has a background in working on and managing engagements within a variety of industries, including defending against class actions related to overdraft fees assessed by banks and credit unions. She has significant experience with the processing and reporting systems used by financial institutions, as well as the data underlying such systems.

Heather has used SQL, R, Python, and MS Access in her data programming and reporting work. She is a fluent Mandarin speaker and has been a CFA Charterholder since August 2014.

Heather’s professional experience includes:

• Banking/Financial Services Institutions: Managed teams to conduct analyses for several credit unions and banks involved in class action suits brought by their customers alleging improperly charged overdraft fees under Regulation E issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. For these matters, she oversaw all aspects of the analysis, from the initial data request and data transfer through to the drafting of expert reports. She has worked with numerous types of bank and credit union financial data and reports to determine potential exposure from overdraft fees charged due to account holds, as well as potential exposure under alternate transaction posting order scenarios.
• Valuation of Future Settlement Benefits (Music Streaming Service): Assisted in the estimation of the future royalty payments to class members in support of a motion for final approval of class action settlement. Heather researched and reviewed publicly available documents and financial statements to estimate future streaming trends for songs composed by class members and modeled future cash flows under a variety of potential scenarios.
• Wage & Hour (Hospital): Retained by a hospital group to review and analyze payroll and time punch data for non-exempt hourly personnel, and determine potential damages related to overtime payments, meal and rest break violations, and time system rounding errors, all in accordance with California state law.
• Reserve Estimate (Manufacturing): Provided a regular quarterly asbestos settlement reserve estimate for a client for the past five years, which involves coordinating with the client to receive data, design calibration windows for the estimation, prepare data for analysis, and model potential future settlement amounts.
• Wage & Hour (Transportation): Retained as part of a team by a major truckload shipping carrier company to defend a class action complaint brought by the company’s drivers, alleging improper overtime paid based on hours worked. Heather reviewed the opposing expert witness’s report and script production and determined rebuttal points. She also created a model from the available driver logs and internal payroll data which calculated potential overtime exposure for drivers for whom data was available, and extrapolated damages for drivers for whom no data was available.