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My daughter, a veterinary school student, was severely injured when she was a passenger on a bus that swerved to miss a deer and broke through the guardrail and down an embankment. Her long-term memory is severely impaired. Her neurologist says the brain injuries will likely be permanent. How will her loss of career and potential earnings be calculated?
Calculating potential loss of earnings and loss of a future career is not easy. That’s why your attorney will need to hire not one, but two experts, a vocational rehabilitation specialist and a forensic economist, to assist the jury in understanding the numbers and coming to a decision about an appropriate award.
A vocational rehabilitation specialist will test your daughter to see what transferable skills she has maintained and what vocational endeavors are still possible. Perhaps she can still work with animals in a different capacity, for example. The goal is to reasonably project the career path your daughter would have pursued if not for the injury and the skills she can now use to transfer to another type of work. This includes finding the cost of training for a new job type and what the pay scale for the new career path will be.
All of this information is then passed along to a forensic economist whose job it is to review the documentation and to put the loss of earning capacity into some real numbers to represent what your daughter’s lifetime earnings would have been. No one can state with certainty the exact path your daughter would have pursued, so the economist usually presents more than one scenario. He would research what a vet in private practice earns in your part of the country, as well as a vet working for a clinic, one working for a non-profit organization, etc.
Based on the vocational rehabilitation specialist’s findings, mitigating income (the income she can make from her transferable skills and potential job options) will also be presented. When your attorney questions the economist on the witness stand, he will help the jury understand rates of inflation and present value and how they affect the dollar amounts.
Let’s take a look at a hypothetical injury victim, Jamie. Jamie was in her 3rd year of vet school with one more year to go. She is 29 years old. Her long-term memory has been permanently impaired. Her mother testifies in her deposition that Jamie had planned to work close to home outside of Chicago and open her own office after working as a vet for one year in an internship program with the Humane Society. She would have made $35,000 as an intern. Jamie’s attorney hires George Jones, a Vocational Rehabilitation specialist who determines through testing and speaking with Jamie’s doctors, that Jamie will be unable to do any work that requires long-term memory of complicated facts or scientific terms. She would be able to work the front office for a vet earning $30,000-$40,000 a year.
Jim Econ, a forensic economist, is hired to put together figures and determines that after her year as an intern, in her first year in private practice, Jamie would have made $60,000 in Chicagoland. Her income would have increased by about 25-30% per year over the next 4 years, and would have leveled off at about $150,000 per year for the balance of her career. Over her career, she would have earned, a total of about $6.6 million, assuming retirement at age 65. Jamie’s transferable skills will allow her to work in a vet’s front office. The average income for a front office person is $30-40,000 a year, or about $1.5 million to $2 million over her work life, which is likely to be shorter now. Of course, all of these numbers would have to be adjusted for inflation. The difference between what she could make now and what she would have made had she not been injured will be her lost earning capacity. That would be between about $4.6 million and $5.1 million.
Obviously this is only an example with fictitious facts and figures. Your case may be significantly different. This was suburban Chicago. If you live in Wausau, Wisconsin, the numbers might be substantially lower. In Chicago proper, possibly a bit higher.
For information on how to value your specific claim for loss of earning capacity, you must work with a knowledgeable and experienced personal injury attorney and the experts indicated above. |
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