A career interrupted, a body injured, a life shortened. The models here are the most standardized in forensic economics, which moves the fight to the inputs.
Start a conversation with Cournot, the Institute’s damages concierge, already scoped to personal & employment. Select a subject area to prompt it, or describe the dispute directly.
Personal injury, wrongful death and employment disputes generate more damages testimony than any other corner of litigation, and the field has responded by standardizing. The core model is settled: project what the person would have earned, add the benefits and services that travel with work, subtract what they can still earn, cost out the care the injury requires, and discount the whole stream to present value. Government data supplies much of the machinery: earnings distributions, worklife expectancy tables, labor force statistics, medical cost trends. That standardization changes where cases are won. Opposing experts rarely disagree about the shape of the model; they disagree about the base earnings, the growth rate, the worklife figure, the discount rate, the care plan, and each of those inputs moves the award. This area covers the three load-bearing pieces: the earnings loss itself, the cost of future care, and the worklife and discounting machinery that converts decades of projected loss into a present figure. Throughout, a boundary holds: what offsets apply, how awards are taxed, and what discounting a jurisdiction requires are questions of law that vary by claim and forum, and they belong to counsel.
Three components, and the inputs that decide each.
The earnings base, the growth path, the benefits that travel with work, and the mitigation question on the other side of the ledger.
investigateThe life care plan and its economics: medical foundation, pricing, growth rates, and the medical inflation problem that dominates long horizons.
investigateHow long the earnings would have run, and what a dollar decades out is worth today. The two multipliers that quietly decide individual awards.
investigateHow the Institute approaches an individual-loss question.
Because the model compounds small input differences over decades. A modestly higher earnings growth rate, a worklife figure two years longer, and a discount rate slightly lower each nudge the number the same direction, and multiplied across a thirty-year horizon the combined effect is large. This is not evidence that the field is arbitrary; it is evidence that the inputs are where the case lives. The practical response is to demand sourcing: which table, which dataset, which year, and why the individual facts justify any departure from the statistical baseline. An expert whose inputs all lean the same way has made a choice that cross-examination will surface.
Earnings are what the person was making; capacity is what the person was able to make. The distinction matters most where the two diverge: a student with no earnings history but demonstrable prospects, a parent who left the workforce with skills intact, a self-employed person whose draw understates the value of their labor. Capacity framing requires evidence that the potential was real, education, credentials, work history, vocational assessment, rather than aspiration. Which framing a claim permits, and what a plaintiff must prove for each, varies by jurisdiction and claim type, and is counsel's question. The economic work is the same either way: establish the baseline path with evidence, then measure the injury against it.
The full compensation bundle, and often the unpaid work too. Employer-provided benefits, health coverage, retirement contributions, and their value can be a substantial fraction of wages, belong in the projection when the evidence supports them. Household services, the cooking, maintenance, childcare and management a person can no longer perform, are a recognized component with their own valuation literature, priced at replacement cost. In wrongful death matters the analysis typically deducts the decedent's own personal consumption, the share of income the person would have spent on themselves, which is a standard adjustment with published methodology. Each component needs its own evidentiary foundation; a loss figure that quietly assumes the benefits and services rather than establishing them gives the rebuttal easy material.
Shorter horizons, different mitigation dynamics, and a different legal frame. A termination case typically measures back pay from the adverse action to judgment and front pay over some bounded future period, rather than a career-length projection, and the end of the damages period is itself a contested input: when the person found or should have found comparable work. Mitigation evidence, the search, the offers, the replacement earnings, plays a larger role than in injury matters, and the treatment of taxes can differ because employment recoveries are generally taxable where personal physical injury recoveries generally are not, a distinction with modeling consequences that counsel should confirm for the specific claim. The machinery is the same; the frame around it is tighter.
Describe the person and the injury or termination. The Institute will help you see which inputs will move the number and what evidence each needs.