Massachusetts Personal Injury Library
Calculating Future Damages in a Massachusetts Wrongful Death Claim (Part A)
When filing a wrongful death lawsuit, there is a formula used to calculate the total amount of compensation you are entitled to for past, present and future damages.
Damages include:
- medical bills,
- burial expenses, and
- funeral expenditures;
and can be documented using receipts and invoices.
But how do you determine the amount of future damages to which you may be entitled?
Lost Wages
The most visible component of future damages is the amount of lost wages. Lost wages (or lost income, or lost earnings) refers to the money the victim would have earned throughout their lifetime if they had not died prematurely.
The simplest way to generally calculate lost wages would be to multiply the victim’s annual salary by the number of years they were expected to continue working had the accident not occurred.
For example, if a 35-year-old man who died in a car accident earned $45,000 a year as a teacher, and the mandatory retirement age in his school district is 65 years of age, then his lost wages would be $1.35 million (30 years of work times $45,000 per year).
Consulting a Wrongful Death Lawyer
In practice, the process to compute lost wages is slightly more complicated, which is why a Massachusetts wrongful death lawyer will often consult an economist to make more sophisticated calculations. They may also consult a worklife expectancy table to determine how much money a victim would have earned in future years.
Sometimes, prior earning records do not exist for a given individual. In these cases, an attorney will estimate what your loved one would have earned based on other information about them.
This approach might be necessary in cases where the victim was:
- enrolled in nursing school
- actively studying for and taking exams to prepare them to become an actuary
- an unpaid carpentry intern or apprentice
- a recent university graduate searching for their first job
To get a more detailed understanding of what your Massachusetts wrongful death case might be worth, it would be in your best interest to consult with an experienced Boston personal injury attorney who specializes in wrongful death lawsuits.
It is very important that the lawyer has handled these types of cases and that they understand wrongful death cases.
Continue to Calculating Future Damages in a Massachusetts Wrongful Death Claim (Part B) >>
