One key factor in receiving the damages you deserve in a personal injury case is to present the right value for lost future earnings. While it's often reasonably straightforward to calculate lost earnings between your accident and the court case, it's much more of a challenge to figure out what your injury may prevent you from ever earning in the future.

There are three key elements to making this calculation with any degree of accuracy. Here is a brief guide to these three elements. 

1. Your Prior Earning Capacity

In order to be able to compare the future, you'll need to demonstrate what you earned in the past and the trajectory you were on. This involves documenting your education, certifications, skills in your field, and related talents. These add value to your career and allow you to have reached your current income level. Some may also be affected by your injuries. 

In addition, your earnings trajectory can be found by looking at how your income changed and grew over the years leading up to your accident. This analysis shows where you started, how much income you've reached, and the time (and effort) it's taken to chart this path. 

2. Effects of Your Injury

The second facet of future income loss is how your injury affects your ability to continue earning at these levels. A pianist, for example, would suffer severe — and generally obvious —  income loss from serious hand injuries. This case might be easy to document. 

But what about a pianist who now suffers from PTSD due to their accident? This might affect their ability to perform in front of others, to work with an orchestra, or to schedule as many gigs as they used to. An important part of their case would be to have experts who can demonstrate and document these new limitations. 

3. Your Future Estimated Earnings

The hardest part of all, certainly, is to turn this data into actionable numbers that correspond to what you might lose out on in the future.  

The pianist whose PTSD prevents them from taking on certain gigs, for instance, might calculate a baseline using the value of those gigs at their current skill levels. Then an expert might assess how much work reduction the victim might have to make to accommodate their new health condition. Finding the value of that loss over many years, though, may require adding in inflation, market changes, and continuing skill growth. 

Success in your personal injury case means being able to conduct research into all these factors and then present it in legally compelling ways. Your best bet during this process is to work with experts in determining economic damages. Learn more today by making an appointment with a damages expert in your area.

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