Determination of Value: Guidance on Developing and Supporting a Credible Opinions

CHAPTER SEVEN

Reasonableness Tests

AS YOU NEAR THE COMPLETION of an engagement, the Credibility Pyramid requires that you formulate a set of procedures that are intended to be supportive and probative of the opinion about to be proffered as a result of your analytical process. I refer to those procedures as “reasonableness tests,” which I like to define as “analytical procedures applied to the opined results with the objective of establishing a commonsense and logical inference, void of speculation, on which to reach a supportive and probative assertion of the proffered results.”

For educational purposes, I find it useful to look to the following judicial guidance on what constitutes “reasonableness”:

Articulating precisely what “reasonable suspicion” and “probable cause” mean is not possible. They are commonsense, nontechnical conceptions that deal with the factual and practical considerations of everyday life on which reasonable and prudent men, not legal technicians[,] act. As such, the standards are not really, or even usefully, reduced to a neat set of legal rules. We have described reasonable suspicion simply as a particularized and objective basis for suspecting the person stopped of criminal activity, and probable cause to search as existing where the known facts and circumstances are sufficient to warrant a man of reasonable prudence in the belief that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found. We have cautioned that these two legal principles are not “finely-tuned ...