No spreadsheet can ever hold the value of a human life. But the legal system still asks for one.
When a person dies due to the negligence of another party, the family’s claim ultimately becomes a number. This number should include compensation for lost income, lost benefits, lost guidance, and losses that no economist can put a number on. Most families have no knowledge of how the figure is arrived at, and the online “wrongful death settlement calculator” tools will not help enlighten them.
If you are considering a wrongful death claim, here is how calculating damages in wrongful death cases actually works — the categories, the math, and the experts who do it.
Economic Damages vs. Non-Economic Damages: Two Buckets
Every dollar of wrongful death recovery ends up in one of two buckets.
Economic damages are the countable losses:
- The income the deceased would have earned
- The health insurance and pension that came with it
- Medical bills from the final injury
- Funeral and burial expenses recovery.
Non-economic damages cover what no receipt can show.
- Loss of consortium damages for a spouse,
- The loss of guidance and companionship that children lose with a parent’s death.
State law forms both buckets. The wrongful death statute of New Jersey is based on pecuniary loss, the measured financial value of what the family lost, while Pennsylvania takes a broader view of the family’s intangible losses.
Yet another distinction is that the wrongful death claim compensates the survivors. A survival action compensates the estate for what the deceased experienced before death. This could include conscious pain and suffering, and their own medical expenses. Survival action damages in New Jersey and Pennsylvania run alongside the wrongful death claim in the same lawsuit.
It’s the same loss, but with two concurrent claims. The math is different.
How Lost Earnings Are Actually Calculated
Start with the salary. Then keep going.
An expert in forensic economics constructs the income forecast from the age at which the deceased passed away.
The expert totals his or her earnings, education, and probable path of advancement, then adds in increases, promotions, inflation, and anticipated age of retirement. Benefits are also taken into account. Employer health coverage and contributions to retirement often add 20 to 30 percent on top of wages.
Economists use more solid information, such as wage and employment statistics, for this work that is published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Actual numbers beat guesswork.
However, a lump sum today grows over time. For this reason, all those future dollar calculations get discounted to present value. Lost inheritance claims enter here, as well. These are the savings and assets the deceased would have accumulated and passed on in a will or trust.
In the end, the law makes the sum correct. Criteria for wrongful death compensation include the age, health, and earning capacity of the deceased, as well as the number of dependents relying on that income.
Both New Jersey and Pennsylvania also apply comparative negligence, meaning if the deceased person was also at fault for the accident, their recovery will be reduced by that percentage.
The figure is not selected. It is built piece by piece.
Assessing Household Services and Parental Guidance
No one bills their family for yard work, driving to activities, repairing the leaky faucet, or assisting with algebra homework. The law still values those contributions in any event, using replacement cost.
How much would you have to pay someone to do everything the person who died was doing at home? Taking care of the kids, cooking, cleaning the house, driving people around, and keeping the family checkbook in order. Estimate how much you would pay someone to do all of that, then add it up over a number of years.
People are always shocked by the final number, but they shouldn’t be. Running a household as a parent provides tens of thousands of dollars in services annually, every year, even if those duties don’t come with a paycheck. Guidance gets valued, too. Courts recognize that a child who loses a parent also loses the advice, moral training, and nurturing.
Therefore, the law assigns that loss a monetary value, often benchmarked against what counselors, tutors, and advisors charge.
It’s cold arithmetic for a loss with human feeling, but it’s the only tool the system has.
The Wrongful Death Expert Witness
Insurance companies have people working for them whose job is to shrink your total compensation package. You’ll want people working for you whose job is to fight back.
A projection is given its backbone by a wrongful death expert witness. Earnings and present-value calculations are handled by forensic economists. What the deceased’s career would have become—the promotion that was coming, the credential half-earned—is established by vocational experts. The value of services and guidance is documented by life care planners and household economists.
Their testimony makes the difference between a demand letter with a defensible number and one that an adjuster can wave off as wishful thinking.
In cases that are worth pursuing, these experts usually end up paying for themselves several times over.
The Number Should Reflect the Whole Loss
It hurts to lose a loved one before their time due to another party’s negligence. And yet, families in this position are asked to grieve and negotiate at the same time, against professionals who do this every day.
Folkman Law levels the field. With offices in Cherry Hill and Philadelphia, the firm handles wrongful death claims on both sides of the river and works with the economists and experts who make full valuations stick. If you’ve lost a loved one due to someone else’s negligence, speak with an attorney about what your claim is truly worth.
Don’t accept any compensation amount that’s built by the other side.
