Life care plan present value: two work-life scenarios, one medical cost stream
The vocational expert gave two post-injury work-life expectancies, not one. Reducing them to a single damages figure would have thrown away the most honest thing about the estimate.
Counsel needed the present value of a claimant’s lost earnings and of a life care plan prepared by a certified life care planner, for mediation — with the vocational expert’s two disability scenarios carried through rather than averaged.
Take the earnings inputs from the vocational expert
Pre- and post-injury earnings, fringe benefits at 25.3 percent, and both post-injury work-life expectancies come from the vocational economic assessment and are cited to it.
Keep the scenarios separate all the way to the total
One assumes a non-severe mobility disability; the other assumes combined non-severe cognitive and mobility disabilities. They produce two work-life horizons and are carried through to two damages figures.
Discount the care plan to life expectancy, not work life
Future medical needs run on a different horizon from earnings and are present-valued to statistical life expectancy.
Show the offsets
Post-injury earning capacity is deducted in both scenarios, with its own fringe-benefit treatment, so that the reader sees the gross loss and the net.
Where the difference between the scenarios shows up
The two scenarios produce identical gross earnings loss. Everything separating them sits in the offset — how much the claimant can be expected to earn, and for how long. That is a vocational judgment, and it moves the total by a little over $200,000.
The life care plan is the larger component in both, at about $1.64 million against totals of roughly $2.3 million and $2.5 million. Present-valuing it is arithmetic. Deciding what belongs in it is not, and that remains the life care planner’s opinion throughout.
What we do not do
We do not merge two experts’ scenarios into one number because a single number is easier to quote. If the vocational expert gives two, the economist gives two.
We also do not stretch a horizon to suit a total. Earnings run to statistical work-life expectancy and medical costs run to statistical life expectancy, and where those horizons differ they are shown differently.
Two scenarios carried through to two totals
Keeping the vocational expert’s two disability scenarios distinct through to the final figure, so that the difference between them stayed visible as a vocational question instead of disappearing into an average.
Parties, jurisdictions and identifying facts are altered or withheld. Methods, data volumes and outcomes are not.
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