Massachusetts Matrimonial Vocational Expert Services

The Probate and Family Court, whose page lists divorce, paternity, child support, custody and parenting time within its jurisdiction and alimony among its services. Its location page places the Suffolk Probate and Family Court in Boston, with a virtual registry and a guide to remote hearings. The Appeals Court is the Commonwealth's intermediate appellate court and the Supreme Judicial Court its highest, by their own pages. Attorneys confirm the governing rule for their case.

In five situations: a spouse out of the workforce whose schooling and earlier employment still support an occupation; claimed underemployment, where a spouse works below the level that background supports; a claimed disability, where the medical record fixes the restrictions and the occupations that stay inside them; a parent caring for a disabled child, whose hours for work are bounded by the child's documented care; and a post-judgment change, where an alimony or support order is revisited after a spouse's circumstances changed. Each asks what the spouse or parent is able to earn, not what that person earns now.

No. KWVRS accepts matrimonial engagements from either spouse's counsel, the evaluation may be of either spouse, and the opinion is neutral whichever party retains it. The methodology does not change with the retaining party: one set of records, one occupational classification system and one published wage series support the opinion in every engagement, so the other side's expert can reproduce it and dispute it on the merits. Counsel frames the question; the file decides the answer, which may be that the spouse's earning capacity is at or below what the spouse earns now.

Whether a spouse or a parent can obtain and hold work and what that work would pay. The evaluator reviews the education, employment, financial and any medical records, interviews and where the question calls for it tests the spouse, identifies through a transferable skills analysis the occupations that background opens, and surveys what those occupations pay where the spouse lives, then states an earning capacity the court can set beside present earnings, with the time a return to work would take and any retraining the opinion assumes.

Two U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics programs. The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program supplies the wages of the occupations the spouse's background opens; its metropolitan release names the Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH area for a spouse whose work is in Boston or the communities around it. The Local Area Unemployment Statistics program, which by its page reports labor force data for states, counties, metropolitan areas and many cities by place of residence, supplies the unemployment rate of the same area. The report names the area it applied and explains the choice when a work history reaches into a second labor market.

A full report is typically 30 to 60 days from receipt of complete records. Within that range the timing turns on whether one spouse or both are assessed, on when the education, employment and financial records arrive and on when the interview and any testing can be scheduled. Deposition and trial testimony follow the Probate and Family Court's schedule, and a rush timeline is arranged case by case when counsel asks for it at engagement.

The method is shared; the question is not. A personal injury evaluation measures what an injury took from a claimant's earning capacity against pre-injury earnings. A matrimonial assessment measures a spouse's or a parent's prospective earning capacity for alimony, child support or the division of property, with no injury in the frame unless a claimed disability is at issue. The guide Vocational Evaluations in Divorce and Alimony Cases explains what the report shows and how an imputed earning capacity is built.

That alimony is court-ordered support paid by one spouse to the other for a period of time after a divorce; that a spouse whose divorce judgment did not mention alimony can file a complaint for alimony for the first time after the divorce; and that the person paying or the person receiving alimony, or both together, can ask for a change. A post-judgment vocational assessment serves that last question by setting the earning capacity at the time of the order beside the capacity now, from the records of both dates. Earning capacity in Massachusetts alimony cases describes that assessment.