Our Team
Jason Gart

Jason H. Gart, PhD

Vice President

Work at HAI | Legal

Jason is a nationally recognized applied historian and serves as a senior subject matter expert in the research and analysis service line. He has successfully directed upward of four hundred historical research investigations, including multiple high-profile assignments for Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies, which have enabled his clients to reduce their financial liability, obtain successful judgments, and comply with regulatory requirements. Jason has been interviewed and quoted in the New York Times and Law360 and was selected as a Lawdragon Global 100 Leader in Legal Strategy & Consulting for the past two years.

Jason’s areas of expertise include historical and factual research methods, business and institutional history, environmental history, corporate genealogy research, and slavery era disclosure and compliance research. He served as a testifying expert on a cultural resource management issue and was lead historian on a multiyear research investigation for outside counsel of a leading aerospace company that resulted in the recovery of $32.5 million in CERCLA response costs from the U.S. government.

Clients rely on Jason to successfully execute numerous types of investigations, including the following:  

  • State of knowledge investigations
  • Cost allocation analysis
  • Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) due diligence
  • Potentially responsible party (PRP) searches
  • Corporate succession and corporate genealogy research
  • Historic government contract searches
  • Federal and military specifications research
  • Land use and site histories
  • Watershed and water use histories
  • Product liability and toxic tort research
  • Slavery era disclosure research
  • Nuclear industry site histories
  • Research on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan

Jason’s non-litigation projects have included a multiyear research and writing effort for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on the history of bank regulation and supervision; an agency-wide assessment for the Department of Veterans Affairs to establish a History Office and archives facility; a research and writing effort for Deloitte Canada in support of a book-length history published as 150 Years and Counting: Our Legacy and Our Future (2010); and oral history projects for The Pew Charitable Trusts and the National Institutes of Health.

Government Service

Jason recently served as one of ten nongovernmental members appointed to the Federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Advisory Committee. Chartered by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the FOIA Advisory Committee advises on improvements to the administration of FOIA, reporting to the Archivist of the United States.

Path to HAI | Legal

Before joining HAI | Legal in 2007, Jason was owner of a consulting firm that provided historical research services and served as managing director of Ask a Historian.com, an internet company.

Jason graduated cum laude with a BS in history and politics from Drexel University and received an MA in public history and his PhD in history from Arizona State University, where he studied under public history pioneer Noel J. Stowe. Jason has been a guest lecturer for graduate-level history seminars and a panel member for a continuing legal education (CLE) course on factual research. He has also served on the executive council of the Society for History in the Federal Government and has presented at the annual meetings of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Organization of American Historians.