Services

Personal Injury

The combined experience of our professional staff and our Company files of settled cases add up to an unparalleled resource to support your client’s claim.

Reports from vocational experts deal with loss of earning capacity; occupational therapists evaluate needs for personal support, equipment or home modifications; a forensic accountant's report meticulously deals with financial aspects of a claim.

We have dealt with everything, from straight-forward Workers Compensation matters to catastrophic trauma resulting in tetraplegia; from obstetric medical negligence to acquired mental impairment in adulthood.

Occupational Therapist (OT) Reports
OT Reports identify and cost your client’s needs for personal and domestic care and assistance, home modification and ongoing treatment.

EVIDEX OT Reports incorporate a home visit, even with non-metropolitan claimants. This work practice allows for a more intimate understanding of your clients’ needs and the opportunity to present photographic evidence. The result is a stronger, more reliable report.

Consistent with our one-stop service philosophy, OT reports include present-value costing of lifetime needs by a Forensic Accountant and cover:

• assessment of needs for personal care and assistance based on residual function
• recommendations and costs of aids, equipment, domestic services and home and/or workplace modifications
• analysis of lifetime needs as family circumstances change (retirement of parent carers, care of claimants' present and future children)

Activities of Daily Living Report (ADL)
This concise report is produced in non-catastrophic cases where the claimant is living semi-independently but with some assistance. An extended ADL is produced in circumstances of relatively severe injuries or complex family or care arrangements.

Life Care Plan (LCP)
Life Care Plans deal with cases of dependency created by catastrophic injuries such as a brain or spinal injury. As the title indicates, the report deals with all aspects of the claimants needs for optimal participation in life’s activities.

Aspects covered may include scheduling respite care or vacations, therapeutic interventions and home and vehicle modifications. Life Care Plans are highly relevant to Structured Settlements.

These comprehensive reports are prepared by our most senior and experienced staff who bring years of clinical, field and rehabilitation experience, as well as specific training in medico-legal reporting.

“Day In the Life” – DVD
Day in the life DVDs are designed to provide a compelling, visual representation of what a typical day is life for a person with a catastrophic injury. These DVDs are best used in conjunction with either our Life Care Plan or Activities of Daily Living Assessments.

Vocational Assessment
A Vocational Assessment is useful only if it produces hard data:

• What were the claimant's pre-injury career prospects?
• Have these been affected by injury?
• If so, by how much?

The hard part: future earning capacity
The most difficult and contentious part of a claim for economic loss in personal injury will be the evaluation of future earning capacity.

Work capacity outcomes depend on a host of factors, many of them highly subjective to the claimant. Vocational Assessments are prepared by Occupational Therapists. Their unique understanding of matching an injured person’s physical capacities with job requirements coupled with their extensive experience in assisting injured workers in returning to work, qualifies our professionals to provide exactly the evidence required.

Elements of a Vocational Assessment
The Vocational Assessment integrates all the elements relating to earning capacity into an easy-to-read document. It covers:

• Pre-injury occupation, career and employment prospects
• Chronology of injury, treatment and work-related events
• Restrictions due to injury
• Analysis of transferable skills
• Exhaustive analysis/elimination of potential occupations
• Estimate of work capacity (hours per week)
• Possibility of early retirement
• Statistical analysis of future employment prospects

This information forms the basis for the Forensic Accountant to calculate any loss of earning capacity caused by injury, whether in the form of wages, business profit share or other benefits.

Difficult cases involving children or those in unconventional occupations can present particular difficulties for litigators but are regarded by EVIDEX as a speciality.

Forensic Accountant’s Reports
Accountants’ reports can be dry and boring documents full of tables of numbers that no-one but another Accountant can understand, right? Not any more.

Over the years, our Forensic Accounting team has developed a highly sophisticated computer programme designed to do two things:

• Automate as many calculations as possible to save time and costs to claimants
• Set out reports in a way that is easy to read and understand

The result is a distinctive narrative style of reporting that is designed to be easily read by non-Accountants. As one client remarked, “even a judge should be happy to read this”.

Business valuations and profits analysis
The Vocational Assessment integrates all the elements relating to earning capacity into an easy-to-read document. It covers:

Establishing the earnings pre and post-injury for tradespeople, self-employed professionals, business owners or farming enterprises can represent quite complex accounting challenges. Where required, EVIDEX Forensic Accountants will reconstruct business accounts from incomplete records, arrive at sensible business valuations or place a value on future activities, crops, livestock and the like.

The great breadth of experience found among the team means that few situations are unfamiliar to us. The same narrative style of reporting is employed.

Economic Loss Assessments
Most economic assessments in personal injury relate to wage and salary earners and cover:

• Past loss of earnings
• Interest on past loss
• Loss of earning capacity
• Superannuation

We recommend that Economic Assessments be supported by a Vocational Assessment; otherwise the Assessment must be limited to pre-injury earning capacity, leaving the practitioner to negotiate a vague and unsatisfactory “cushion” against future loss of employment.