Understanding a Vocational Economics, Inc., Calculation of Lost Earning Capacity in a Personal Injury Case With Residual Capacity

Vocational Economic, Inc. (VEI), is a firm centered in Louisville, Kentucky that has offices in Louisville, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Los Angeles, Nashville, and Tampa. VEI currently lists 16 testifying experts at its website, vocecon.com. A large majority of those experts provide reports and testimony regarding the lost earning capacity of individuals who have been injured and have allegedly lost some portion or all of their earning capacities as the result of allegedly wrongful acts, including a small number of wrongful deaths. Anthony M. Gamboa and David S. Gibson ofVEI have produced controversial worklife tables most recently in 2015 for the purposes of measuring work-lives of injured persons before and after their injuries. However, the specific analytic methods used by VEI testifying experts to produce damages estimates are not explained by the authors of the published tables and have additional problems that go beyond the problems involved with the tables themselves. The methods being used by VEI experts to extract data from government surveys and to use that data to prepare specific estimates of earnings losses in actual reports for litigation are not explained in any existing publication. It is the purpose of this paper to provide that missing explanation for the specific calculation methods being used and to explain manyofthe problems inherent in those methods.