In personal injury litigation, the facts underlying economic loss claims often vary significantly from case to case. Many consultants mistakenly apply a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach to calculating economic damages in personal injury claims. By either remaining unaware of or ignoring key case-specific facts that frame each personal injury loss claim, they simply get it wrong, sometimes to the detriment of their client. At Spectrum, we reject the flawed methodologies and ad hoc or counterfactual assumptions too often relied upon by other consultants and base our personal injury loss evaluations on relevant case-specific facts, sound economic analysis and the most current research and data. For example, we:
- Project earnings based on established past work/earnings patterns, labor agreements and the most current compensation growth forecasts;
- Project self-employment earnings based on a detailed analysis of business revenues and expenses;
- Base loss of medical insurance benefits on the expected incremental cost of coverage, using the most current health benefit survey data;
- Apply actual retirement benefit formulae and contribution rates to calculate losses related to Social Security, private, state, federal or military pensions;
- Base worklife/retirement on the actual pre-injury circumstance, including any early retirement incentives;
- Base post-injury-employment scenarios on reasoned opinions;
- Adjust for mortality and likelihood of employment given pre-injury circumstance;
- Base household services loss on the differential between actual pre-injury and post-injury circumstance;
- Calculate economic loss related to future medical care costs attributable to the claimed injury by adjusting for:
- Actual/expected payments (as opposed to gross charges);
- Normal medical care;
- Care for pre-existing conditions;
- Normal expenditures from earnings, including those for assistive services to the aged;
- Double-counting of household services (i.e. inclusion of services in life care plan in addition to a separate calculation of household services lost);
- Medicare/Medicaid/private insurance offsets (if the jurisdiction permits);
- Expected mortality.
- Discount to present value using current bond yields