A spinal cord injury changes your world in an instant. One moment, you are living your life, building a career, and planning for the future. Next, you are facing a new reality defined by medical treatments, rehabilitation, and immense physical challenges.
Beyond the immediate pain and medical bills, a devastating realization begins to set in: the career you worked so hard to build may now be out of reach. Your ability to provide for yourself and your family has been seriously damaged or even erased.
This loss of future income is one of the most significant damages in a personal injury claim. This situation leads to a serious and complex challenge. You know your life and career path have been permanently altered, but the at-fault party’s insurance company will not simply take your word for it.
They will demand proof. This raises a vital question for anyone in this position. The answer is the key to securing your financial future. You must learn how to prove lost future earnings in a spinal injury lawsuit. This process requires a detailed, evidence-based approach to show the full extent of the financial life that was taken from you.
What is Lost Earning Capacity?
In a legal claim, it is important to distinguish between "lost wages" and "lost earning capacity." Lost wages are straightforward. They are the actual, verifiable income you have already lost from being unable to work between the date of your injury and the date of a settlement or trial.
You can prove this loss with pay stubs and employment records. Lost earning capacity, however, is a forward-looking concept. It is the money you would have reasonably been expected to earn for the rest of your working life if the spinal cord injury had never occurred.
Lost earning capacity is a form of damages designed to compensate you for the loss of your ability to earn a living in the future. It is not just about your job at the time of the accident. It considers your potential for growth, promotion, and advancement. A spinal injury does not just take away your current paycheck; it takes away your career trajectory.
Proving this loss is more complex because it involves making a reasonable projection about a future that will now never happen. The goal is to paint a clear, credible picture for an insurance company or a jury of the professional life you were on track to have.
Your claim for lost earning capacity can include several components of your projected income:
- Future Salaries and Wages: The base income you would have continued to earn.
- Promotions and Raises: The likely increases in pay you would have received based on your performance, experience, and industry standards.
- Bonuses and Commissions: Any performance-based pay you were likely to earn.
- Lost Benefits: The value of employer-provided benefits like health insurance, retirement contributions (401k matches), and pension plans.
- Loss of a Career Path: Compensation for being forced out of your chosen profession into a lower-paying field or being unable to work at all.
The Foundation of Your Claim: Essential Evidence
To build a successful spinal cord injury claim for lost future earnings, you must create a strong foundation of evidence. Your personal story is powerful, but it must be supported by clear, objective documentation.
You and your legal team will work to gather records that together tell the story of your life before the injury and the new, limited reality you face after it. Each piece of evidence serves as a building block, helping to construct a logical and undeniable argument about the value of your lost career.
This evidence gathering is a detailed process examining your health, education, and professional history. The stronger and more organized this documentation is, the more difficult it becomes for an insurance company to dispute the extent of your losses.
They can argue with your opinion, but it is much harder for them to say with the documented facts from your doctors and your employer. This collection of proof is what transforms your loss into a quantifiable legal claim.
- Comprehensive Medical Records: This is the absolute starting point. Your medical records must clearly document the severity of your spinal cord injury, including the diagnosis of conditions like paraplegia or quadriplegia. These records should also contain the treating physician’s prognosis, which is their professional opinion on your long-term physical limitations and the permanency of your condition.
- Your Complete Employment History: You will need to gather your past pay stubs, W-2 forms, tax returns, and any contracts or letters of employment. This history establishes your work ethic, your skills, and your pattern of earnings leading up to the accident.
- Performance Reviews and Promotions: Positive performance evaluations, awards, and records of past promotions are powerful evidence. They show that you were a valued employee on an upward trajectory, making future raises and advancements more likely.
- Testimony from Your Employer: A letter or testimony from your supervisor or a manager can confirm your job duties, your salary, your quality of work, and the opportunities for advancement you had at the company.
- Your Personal Testimony: You will have the chance to describe your career goals, your ambitions, and the plans you had for your future before the spinal cord injury. This helps a jury connect the numbers to the real human loss.
The Professionals Who Help Build Your Case
Proving lost earning capacity is not something you can do with pay stubs alone. It requires the knowledge of specialized professionals who can analyze the evidence and provide official, credible opinions.
These individuals are hired to review your case and provide reports and testimony that explain precisely how your spinal injury has affected your ability to work. Their analysis turns the raw data of your life and career into a clear financial projection that can be presented to an insurance company or a court.
These professionals serve as objective analysts with the calculations and opinions needed to give your claim legal weight. They connect your medical diagnosis to real-world economic consequences. An insurance company might try to dismiss your own estimates as mere speculation, but they cannot easily dismiss the detailed report of a qualified professional who has analyzed every aspect of your case.
A Vocational Specialist
A vocational specialist is a professional who evaluates a person's skills, education, and work history to determine their employment potential. After reviewing your medical records and physical limitations, they will provide an opinion on your ability to return to your old job.
If you cannot, they will determine what other types of jobs, if any, you are capable of performing with your injuries. They will then research the availability and pay scale for those jobs in your local market. Their report will show the difference between what you could have earned and what you could earn now.
An Economist
An economist takes the information provided by the vocational specialist and your employment history and projects your financial losses throughout your expected lifetime. They do not just multiply your old salary by the number of years you had left to work.
They perform a complex calculation that accounts for factors like inflation, expected wage growth in your industry, and the value of lost benefits. They then discount this total to its "present-day value," which is the single lump sum of money you would need today to equal the total amount you earned over your lifetime.
A Life Care Planner
While not exclusively focused on earnings, a life care planner is often involved in severe spinal injury cases. This person, typically a registered nurse or doctor, creates a comprehensive plan outlining your anticipated future medical needs. A critical component your spinal cord attorney can use to support your claim.
This can include future surgeries, medication, mobility equipment like wheelchairs, in-home nursing care, and modifications to your home and vehicle.
This plan helps establish the immense costs associated with your injury, reinforcing the severity of your condition and indirectly supporting the argument that you will be unable to return to meaningful employment.
How Insurance Companies Fight These Claims
Insurance companies exist to be profitable, and they view large claims for lost future earnings as a significant threat to their bottom line. An adjuster from the at-fault party’s insurance company will be assigned to your case, and their job is to find ways to minimize the value of your claim.
They will scrutinize every piece of evidence and look for any weakness they can exploit. They are trained negotiators who will use specific tactics to challenge your projections and pressure you into accepting less than you deserve.
You should be prepared for the insurance company to question every part of your argument. They will not accept your evidence at face value. They may hire their vocational specialist to argue that you can perform more work than your specialist suggests.
They will question the economist’s projections and argue for a lower inflation rate or wage growth. They create doubt around your calculations and justify a much lower settlement offer.
Here are a few common tactics they use:
- Challenging the Injury's Severity: The insurer may argue that your injury is not as limiting as you claim. They may suggest you could return to some form of work, even if it is a lower-paying job, to reduce the amount they have to pay for lost earnings.
- Questioning Your Career Path: They might argue that your past promotions were not guaranteed to continue or that you might have left the workforce for other reasons in the future. They will try to poke holes in the idea that you were on a clear upward trajectory.
- Disputing the Economic Projections: The insurance company will often challenge the numbers used by your economist. They may argue for a lower inflation rate or a higher discount rate to reduce the present-day value of your future losses.
A spinal cord injury forces you to rebuild your life. A key part of that rebuilding process is securing the financial stability that was stolen from you. Proving your lost future earnings is a meticulous and evidence-driven process, but it is mandatory to ensure you have the resources you need for a lifetime of care and security.
Secure the Representation You Can Rely On
It is your right to demand compensation for the future that was taken from you.
If you or a family member is facing the immense challenge of a life-altering spinal cord injury, you do not have to confront these complex issues on your own.
For questions about your case in Austin, Waco, Killeen, Temple, or anywhere in Central Texas, the team at Lorenz & Lorenz, PLLC is here to listen. You can call (512) 477-7333 to discuss your situation.