New York Vocational Expert Witness Services

In a New York personal injury, employment or disability matter the vocational evaluation establishes what the injury, the termination or the impairment did to the person's ability to work. Three opinions come out of it: employability, meaning whether work exists that the claimant can obtain and hold within the restrictions documented in the medical record; earning capacity, meaning what that work pays; and transferable skills, meaning which abilities from the claimant's schooling, training and jobs carry over into occupations that stay within those restrictions. The steps are the same in every assignment. Medical, school, training and employment records are read together with any deposition transcript and prior expert report; the claimant is interviewed and, when the assignment calls for it, tested with standardized instruments; the transferable skills analysis is completed and the labor market survey is run with O*NET, the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and Bureau of Labor Statistics data; and pre-injury and post-injury capacity are compared. The written opinion names the occupations still available, what they pay where the claimant lives and works, and how much earning capacity was lost against pre-injury earnings.

Vocational evidence in New York is offered in four settings, and each puts a different question. In the Supreme Court of each county, personal injury and medical malpractice actions ask what work the plaintiff can still perform with the injury and what it pays, post-injury employability measured against the pre-injury occupation. Within New York City the smaller civil claims, carrying the same employability question, proceed in the Civil Court of the City of New York. Before the New York State Workers' Compensation Board the question narrows to whether the injured worker can go back to work in the labor market given the restrictions that the medical evidence supports. Employment and disability claims under federal law are heard by the U.S. District Courts for the Southern District of New York and the Eastern District of New York, with the Northern and Western Districts covering the rest of the state, and there the vocational opinion speaks to earning capacity and employability on the timetable the court's scheduling order fixes. The core counties, their courthouses, their Appellate Division departments and the federal district that covers each are set out on New York's state page.

Published wage data carries the earning capacity opinion. Once the transferable skills analysis has named the occupations within the claimant's reach, the labor market survey takes each one to the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics series for the wages it pays in the claimant's area and to the Local Area Unemployment Statistics series for the area's unemployment rate, which tells the court how realistic that occupation is for this claimant. On this site thirteen New York city pages carry a metropolitan-area record, among them the New York City and Brooklyn pages and the Buffalo and Albany pages, and each shows the figures of its own area while the state's other city pages show statewide figures; the report is bound to none of those areas, because it draws its wages and its unemployment rate from wherever the claimant lives and works, and a claimant whose work history crosses into a second labor market gets a report that says which area's data it used and why, so the opposing side can test the choice at deposition. The wage and employment data published for the New York-Newark-Jersey City area also covers Bergen County, where KWVRS is headquartered.

Each report sets out its method, the records and data it relied on and every opinion reached, arranged to meet the disclosure requirements of the forum, and those requirements differ between the state courts and the federal districts; the New York expert disclosure page on this site summarizes the practice, and attorneys confirm which rule governs their own case. Deposition and trial follow the calendar of the case, and an opposing report or late-produced records are met with a supplemental opinion. New York matters are accepted at the KWVRS headquarters in Hackensack, in Bergen County, New Jersey. Plaintiff and defense.