Two numbers nobody outside the field has heard of, the worklife figure and the net discount rate, move these awards more than anything argued in front of the jury.
Start a conversation with Cournot, the Institute’s damages concierge, already scoped to worklife & discounting. Pick a starting point, or describe the dispute directly.
Every individual damages model ends with two multipliers. The first is duration: how many more years the person would have worked. The convention is worklife expectancy, drawn from published tables that measure, by age, sex and education, the expected remaining years of labor force participation, absences and exits included, which makes worklife systematically shorter than retirement-age arithmetic and the statistically honest baseline. The tables are averages, and the individual facts can justify departures, in either direction, that must be argued rather than assumed. In death cases duration interacts with a second adjustment, the deduction of the decedent's personal consumption, the share of income the person would have spent on themselves, with published methodology and a fight over the percentage. The second multiplier is the discount machinery: future dollars converted to present value at a rate the law constrains and the economics must justify. The operative quantity is the net discount rate, the spread between the assumed earnings growth and the assumed interest rate, and small movements in that spread compound across decades into large movements in the award. Some experts adopt the total offset position, growth and discounting canceling exactly; whether that assumption is permissible is jurisdiction-dependent and counsel's question, but its economic content, a specific claim about the long-run relationship between wage growth and interest rates, should be defended as such rather than adopted as a convenience. These two multipliers attract less courtroom drama than the injury and the earnings, and decide more.
Duration and discounting: where individual awards are actually determined.
Expected remaining years in the labor force by age, sex and education. The statistical baseline every departure must argue against.
The person’s own record: continuous employment, gaps, health, occupation demands. The basis for moving off the average.
In death cases: the share of income the decedent would have consumed personally, deducted with published methodology.
The spread between earnings growth and the interest rate. The quantity that actually moves the award.
Jurisdictions constrain discounting methods and rates. The model must live inside the law that applies, which counsel identifies.
The position that growth and discounting cancel. An economic claim wearing a procedural costume; it deserves economic scrutiny.
How the Institute approaches the machinery.
Quietly, most of the award.
A model can pair a defensible growth rate with a defensible discount rate and still embed an indefensible spread between them. Experienced rebuttal experts compute the net rate first and ask whether any economy ever sustained it. Compute it yourself before they do.
Because the tables measure what actually happens, and what actually happens includes exits. People leave the labor force before conventional retirement for health, family, unemployment and choice, and they sometimes return; worklife expectancy nets all of that into an expected figure that is systematically shorter than a straight projection to a retirement age. Using the table is the defensible default, and the individual facts then argue for adjustment: a person with decades of uninterrupted employment and strong attachment may support a figure above the average for their cohort, while health conditions or an occupation with early physical limits may support less. What draws the challenge is skipping the baseline entirely and asserting retirement-age arithmetic, because the first cross-examination question is why the published data was set aside.
From published studies of household expenditure, which estimate the share of family income a member consumes personally, and the share varies with income level and household size in ways the studies document: the percentage falls as income rises and as the household grows, because fixed family costs spread over more people. The fight is usually over scope as much as percentage, what counts as personal consumption against shared family expenditure, and over whether the deduction applies to income alone or to services too. It is a standard adjustment with a real literature behind it, which means both that ignoring it is indefensible in most death cases and that a percentage chosen without reference to the studies will be measured against them.
It is the assumption that future earnings growth and the discount rate cancel each other exactly, so the award equals the sum of undiscounted current-dollar losses. Its appeal is simplicity; its content is a strong empirical claim, that wage growth and interest rates are equal over the relevant horizon, which historical data supports in some periods and contradicts in others. Some jurisdictions permit or even prescribe it, and where the law makes that choice, the economist works within it; that is counsel's terrain. Where the method is a choice rather than a mandate, it should be defended with the same rigor as any other assumption, because opposing experts will present the historical spread data, and "it was simpler" is not a rebuttal.
Frame-mixing, in three familiar forms. Real against nominal: earnings grown in inflation-adjusted terms must be discounted at a real rate, and nominal projections at a nominal rate; crossing the frames builds a systematic bias whose direction depends on the crossing. Tax asymmetry: if earnings are projected after tax, the discount rate should be an after-tax return, because the plaintiff investing the award will pay tax on the interest; taxing one side of the model and not the other tilts the result. And risk asymmetry: discounting a projection at a rate whose riskiness does not match the certainty the projection claims. Each error is invisible in the bottom line and obvious in the workpapers, which is why the workpapers are where rebuttal experts start.
Describe the claim and the model. The Institute will help you see whether the machinery holds together.