Pennsylvania Matrimonial Vocational Expert Services

A Pennsylvania divorce, support or custody action is filed in the county's Court of Common Pleas. On the judiciary's own description of how its courts work, a divorce is a civil case, parts of a divorce, support or child custody matter may go before a hearing master or a conference officer, and either party may take an appeal from a civil decision; the Superior Court of Pennsylvania is one of the two intermediate appellate courts that sit statewide. The First Judicial District's page names its family forum the Court of Common Pleas, Family Division, with Domestic Relations and Juvenile as its two branches, the Domestic Relations branch dealing with support, custody and divorce, and the Fifth Judicial District's page names the Family Division of the Court of Common Pleas of Allegheny County, whose Adult Section addresses child support, custody and divorce; the Pennsylvania state page lists the courts of common pleas by county and judicial district. A matrimonial vocational assessment answers one question in that forum: what a spouse is able to earn, as distinct from what the spouse earns today. Five situations bring the question to a vocational expert.

The first is a spouse who has been out of the workforce, often through years of raising children or working in a family business, whose education, training and work history still support an occupation and a wage; the assessment identifies that occupation, the timeline for re-entry and any retraining the spouse would need. The second is claimed underemployment: a spouse working below the level his or her background supports, where the assessment reports what that background supports and whether the work is available in the spouse's labor market. The third is a claimed disability, where the assessment reads the medical record for the restrictions it documents and states which occupations remain open under those restrictions and what they pay.

The fourth is the care of a disabled child, where a parent's earning capacity is assessed against the hours and the schedule that the child's documented care needs leave for work. The fifth is a post-judgment change: a support order revisited because a spouse's circumstances, health or labor market changed after the decree, where the assessment compares the earning capacity at the time of the order with the capacity now. In each situation the method is the same. The education, employment, financial and any medical records are reviewed; the spouse is interviewed and, where appropriate, tested; the occupations the spouse's background opens are identified through a transferable skills analysis; and a labor market survey reports what those occupations pay in the spouse's own area from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics series, with the Local Area Unemployment Statistics rate for that area as the measure of whether the work is there to be had. The labor table on this page names the wage areas this site reports for Pennsylvania cities; the assessment itself applies the figures of the area in which the spouse lives and works.

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: the same records, the same occupational classification systems and the same published wage series support the opinion whichever spouse's counsel commissioned it, so that the opposing expert can reproduce the analysis, and the opinion may be that a spouse already earns at or above capacity. The report separates the wage of the position the spouse held from what the positions open to the spouse would pay, documents the methodology and the data relied on, and is organized to the disclosure requirements of the Court of Common Pleas hearing the matter; deposition and trial testimony follow the court's schedule. Attorneys confirm the governing rule for their case. KWVRS works with attorneys nationwide from its New Jersey, Virginia and Rhode Island offices.