How to Calculate Lost Wages in Personal Injury Lawsuits

In a personal injury lawsuit, the plaintiff seeks damages from the defendant for medical bills, pain and suffering, loss of ability to enjoy life and lost wages into the future. Depending on the job and type of injury, the amount of money rewarded for lost wages can vary vastly. Personal injury lawyer, Charles Flaxman, Charles Flaxman, a lawyer at Flaxman Law Group based in south Florida, sheds some light on how to calculate lost wages.

Lost wages in the past and, even more so, in the future, are sometimes tough to quantify, but there are ways and means which we have developed to attempt to do exactly that. Depending on the person’s job, their age, the typical upward mobility for that career and a variety of other factors, we are able to make a rough calculation as to how much money this person will lose because of this injury.

There are easy examples of how we do this and much harder ones. An easier case would be if someone has been working the same copper mine for 20 years, with 2% raise each year and 15 years until retirement. We can probably figure with some pretty simple calculations about how much money this person will not be making if they are never able to work again.

But then there are tougher cases to put a dollar amount on. Let’s say a young person just graduated law school. It’s their first year out and they are a clerk in a huge law firm for 12 dollars an hour. Suddenly, they get hit in the head and sustain significant brain damage and now can only work flipping burgers at McDonald’s. While this person was only a clerk at the time of the injury, there is a very likely chance that they could have worked hard and risen to partner and within 10 years be making $300,000 a year. So how do you know? And how do you prove it? We hire vocational rehabilitation experts as well as economists. They will testify as to the present value of money and what others lawyers are making and how long on average it takes to rise to that position and they project that forward and calculate based on that what this person might have been making, compared to what he is able to make after the accident, and subtract and reward the difference.

In cases like these, there is no hard science and everything is really just an educated guess. That is why a good lawyer can artfully spin these numbers into the highest damages possible. There will always be a push and pull and compromise will come either in the mediation room or the courtroom. The plaintiff will claim he could have been a partner, while the defendant will claim they would have never risen past file clerk. In the end, depending on the lawyer, the jury, and most especially the credibility of the plaintiff, a somewhat happy medium will be reached.