Laura Simmons is a certified public accountant (CPA) and has more than twenty years of experience in accounting practice and economic and financial consulting. She has focused on damages and liability issues in litigation involving securities and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, as well as on accounting issues arising in a variety of complex commercial litigation matters. She has served as a testifying expert in cases involving accounting analyses, securities case damages, and research on securities lawsuits.
Dr. Simmons’s research on pre– and post–Reform Act securities litigation settlements has been published in a number of reports and is frequently cited in the public press and legal journals. She has spoken at various conferences and appeared as a guest on CNBC addressing the topic of securities case settlements. She has also published in academic journals, with recent research focusing on the intersection of accounting and litigation.
Dr. Simmons was an accounting faculty member at the Mason School of Business at the College of William & Mary from 2008 through 2011. Prior to her work in academia, she spent more than ten years as a consultant at Cornerstone Research, most recently as a principal. Dr. Simmons developed the firm’s research on securities case settlements and the related settlements prediction model. She was also an accountant with Price Waterhouse for approximately five years.