Augur Advisors LLC
Expert Consulting and Testimony
Litigators increasingly find that reputation is in the case—as claimed damages, as a standard-of-care question about how a company or its advisors communicated, or as the context a jury brings into the room. Augur Advisors makes its principal, Aidan M. Ryan, APR, available to counsel as a consulting expert or as a testifying expert, whether offering opening or rebuttal opinions, on those questions.
Areas of expertise
- Corporate reputation.
- What corporate reputation is, how it is formed and lost among specific stakeholder groups, how it can be measured, and how reputational change relates to enterprise value. Familiar with the academic and practitioner literature on reputation and disclosure, with the measurement approaches used by insurers, rating providers, and communications firms, and with their limits.
- Crisis management.
- The standard of care for companies, boards, and their communications advisors responding to a crisis: what a reasonably prudent organization does, in what sequence, with what disclosures, and how departures from that standard are identified.
- Litigation and legal communications.
- How parties, counsel, and agencies communicate around active litigation, investigations, and regulatory actions; the professional norms governing that work; the interaction between communications conduct and legal exposure; and the evaluation of statements, campaigns, and media strategies after the fact.
- Brand and reputation value.
- Assessment and attribution of reputational harm: whether a specific event, statement, or course of conduct affected reputation, to what degree, for how long, and relative to what would otherwise have occurred. Familiar with the quantitative and qualitative approaches used to answer those questions, including financial-market evidence, media and stakeholder analysis, and reputation-value measurement, and with how each is weighed as evidence.
Forms of engagement
- Consulting expert.
Retained by counsel to assist with case assessment, development of case theory, discovery and deposition preparation, evaluation of opposing experts, and trial support.
- Testifying expert.
Written reports, deposition, and trial testimony, offering opening opinions or rebuttal of an opposing expert's reputation, crisis-response, or communications opinions.
Background
Aidan Ryan has spent his career at the intersection of law, communications, and public affairs. He launched and chaired the crisis and litigation communications practice at an Am Law 200 firm, led the U.S. litigation and legal affairs group at Edelman within its Crisis and Risk practice, and served as Senior Vice President and Head of Issues and Crisis, North America, at We. Communications. He has worked alongside trial counsel at more than a dozen Am Law 100 firms, including on-the-ground trial support through a federal multidistrict bellwether jury trial and third-party witness preparation in a federal trade-secrets dispute.
His matters have included DOJ and SEC resolutions, antitrust and cross-border commercial disputes, intellectual property actions, state attorney general investigations, labor campaigns from the first petition through national scale, executive misconduct, and public-health crises, for companies from the Fortune 10 to venture-backed startups and for the boards of major research universities and cultural institutions.
He is the founder and chief executive of Augur Intelligence Corp, which measures corporate reputation and prices it against financial risk. He has been named to PRovoke Media's Innovator 25 Americas (2026) and PRWeek's 40 Under 40 (2025), and ranked among Lawdragon's Global 100 Leaders in Strategy and Consulting (2021–2023). He holds the Accreditation in Public Relations (APR), a BA from Canisius (valedictorian), and an MSc from the University of Edinburgh.
Publications and commentary
Authored work and quoted commentary on litigation communications, crisis management, and reputation risk have appeared in Bloomberg Law, Law360, Corporate Counsel, The American Lawyer, PRWeek, and PRNEWS; he has presented to the Association of Corporate Counsel and at Georgetown Law. A ten-year publications list is provided with the litigation CV.
Engagement and conflicts
Engagements are contracted through Augur Advisors LLC with retaining counsel, not with the party. A fee schedule, litigation CV, and engagement letter are available on request. Conflict checks run across Augur Advisors' client matters and Augur Intelligence Corp's subscriber base before any retention is accepted.