If your personal injury case proceeds to the stage where the 2 sides meet in a courtroom, you want your hired lawyer to be well-prepared. Good preparations include the identification of any needed experts.
The job of the reconstruction expert
This expert’s work must aim to answer a question: How did the accident take place? Many reconstruction experts can provide a jury with the ability to view diagrams. Some of them even put-together a computer-generated re-enactment of the collision
Why a personal injury lawyer might need a vocational expert?
The client of a personal injury lawyer in Calgary might need a vocational expert, if he or she has been receiving long term disability payments for 2 years. At the conclusion of that 2-year period, the insurance company normally checks to see if the policy holder is ready to return to his or her pre-accident job. If the nature of the client’s injury prevents a return to that job, then the insurance company calls for testing.
The test is supposed to indicate whether or not the client can handle any job that matches with his or her education and experience. If the client disputes the test’s findings, the client’s lawyer may decide to hire a vocational expert. Vocational experts have been trained to evaluate the capabilities of someone that has recovered from an injury.
An economic expert can provide a lawyer with useful information.
That expert’s task concerns the performance of calculations. These experts calculate a client’s/plaintiff’s income loss. At the same time, each of them uses those calculations to assess the value of both past and future earnings.
A cost of care expert works with an occupational therapist.
Normally, someone that is recovering from a debilitating injury spends time at a rehabilitation facility. There, the recovering patient works with a physical therapist. The same patient also spends some time with an occupational therapist.
Eventually, the occupational therapist meets with the cost of care expert. Based on the facts offered in that meeting, the expert’s job becomes that of gathering evidence. The patient’s lawyer wants to know the estimated costs for any care that the lawyer’s client might need in the future.
A medical expert can provide a jury with a proper medical opinion.
There are at least 5 different medical experts that might get contacted by a personal injury lawyer. Their specialties include orthopedic surgery, neurology, neurosurgery, psychology and neuropsychology. A statement from one of those specialists has more value than one from a member of the defendant’s defense team. That fact underscores each specialist’s value. Their opinions hold more weight in the eyes of both the judge and jury than any claims that might be made by the defendant’s lawyer.