By Rovaryn Digital · July 13, 2026 · 6 min read
What Happens When a Section Is Missing
An attorney once told a colleague, mid-deposition, that she didn't need to attack the numbers in his earning-capacity report — she just needed to ask what records he'd reviewed before writing them. He hadn't itemized a sources section. He'd reviewed the medical file, but the report didn't say so anywhere, and under questioning he couldn't reconstruct the list cleanly on the stand. The number wasn't wrong. The report just hadn't shown its work, and that gap became the whole cross-examination. This happens more often than the underlying methodology deserves: a sound wage-earning-capacity calculation, undone by a report that skipped or thinned a section a reader expected to find. By the end of this piece, you'll know the sections a scrutiny-ready earning-capacity evaluation report needs and what each one has to carry to hold up when someone is actively trying to take it apart.
Referral and Identifying Information
Every earning-capacity evaluation report opens by establishing who asked the question and what the question was. This section states who retained the evaluator, the date of retention, the claimant's identifying information, the date of injury or incident, and — critically — the specific referral question being answered. "Assess loss of earning capacity" is not the same question as "assess earning capacity as of the date of maximum medical improvement" or "assess earning capacity assuming the restrictions in Dr. X's report." A vague referral question invites a vague opinion, and a vague opinion is an easy cross-examination target. This section should also disclose the fee arrangement and confirm the evaluation is independent of the outcome — a standard credibility marker for a loss of earning capacity report in a personal injury matter or any comparable litigation-support opinion.
Records and Sources Reviewed
This section is an itemized list, not a summary paragraph: medical records by provider and date range, prior wage and tax records, depositions, an independent medical examination report if one exists, prior job history documentation, and any labor market or occupational data sources consulted. The point of itemizing is defensive. If a cross-examiner asks "did you review the plaintiff's 2019 tax return," the report should already answer that question in writing, and the evaluator's testimony should match the list exactly. A records section that's thin, vague, or reconstructed from memory on the stand is one of the fastest ways an otherwise sound opinion loses credibility.
Background and Vocational History
This section documents the claimant's education, licensure, work history, and — where a physician has documented them — the functional restrictions the evaluator is relying on. It's worth being explicit here that a vocational evaluator is not making the medical determination; the report should cite the specific physician, date, and restriction being adopted as the medical foundation for the vocational opinion. This is also where the pre-injury vocational profile gets established: the occupation(s) the claimant could perform before the injury, the transferable skills those occupations built, and the wage level associated with them. Readers who want the full mechanics of how this history feeds a loss-of-earning-capacity vocational assessment can see how the pre-injury profile connects to the transferable skills analysis that follows.
Methodology
This is the section that gets read most closely by an opposing expert, because it's where the opinion either shows a repeatable method or reveals guesswork. A defensible methodology section names the transferable skills analysis approach used — typically a crosswalk from prior work history to comparable occupations, cross-referenced against Standard Occupational Classification codes — and describes how the resulting occupations were checked for wage data. The Occupational Information Network database that underlies most modern transferable skills crosswalks covers roughly 900 occupation profiles and more than 55,000 jobs (ONET content used under CC BY 4.0; ONET is a trademark of USDOL/ETA), and wage figures for those occupations typically come from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program, which is built from a probability sample of roughly 1.1 million establishments surveyed in semiannual panels. Naming the data source and its sampling basis — rather than just asserting a wage figure — is what turns a number into a methodology.
This section should also state plainly whether a supplemental labor market survey was conducted (direct employer contact to confirm local hiring and wage reality) or whether the opinion relies on published occupational data alone, and why. Readers building this section from scratch may want the fuller walkthrough of how loss of earning capacity is calculated.
Findings: Pre-Injury and Post-Injury Earning Capacity
This is where the methodology gets applied to the specific claimant, and it's usually clearest laid out as a comparison. Consider a simplified, illustrative example: a claimant's pre-injury occupation supports work at $28.00 per hour on a full-time basis, roughly $58,240 annualized. Post-injury restrictions rule out that occupation but leave a band of transferable occupations open at a lower wage — say $19.00 to $22.00 per hour, or roughly $39,520 to $45,760 annualized. The earning capacity loss in this illustration sits in the range of $12,480 to $18,720 per year, before any adjustment for work-life expectancy, geographic labor market, or part-time availability. That arithmetic is the easy part; the section's real job is showing exactly which occupations were compared, at what wage source, and why those specific occupations — not others — were selected as the post-injury benchmark. A report that shows the range and its inputs survives scrutiny better than one that presents a single number with no visible seams.
Limitations and Assumptions
Every earning-capacity opinion rests on assumptions, and stating them is a strength, not a weakness. This section should disclose the geographic labor market assumed, the date the opinion is valid as of, the physician and restriction relied upon, and anything the evaluator was not asked to consider — collateral sources of income, for instance, or mitigation efforts. It should also be explicit that jurisdictional rules governing how loss of earning capacity is calculated and what a damages opinion may or may not include vary by state and by claim type (personal injury, workers' compensation, long-term disability), and that admissibility standards for expert testimony are set by the relevant court, not by the evaluator. None of this is legal advice — it's a disclosure that the opinion was built inside a defined, stated scope, which is exactly what a well-built defensible vocational report does throughout, not just in one section.
Opinion and Certification
The closing section states the opinion in plain, unhedged language, ties it back to the referral question from section one, and carries the evaluator's signature, credentials, and certification statement. More than 15,000 Certified Rehabilitation Counselors practice in the United States, Canada, and several other countries, and that credential — not any software or template — is what makes the preceding sections an opinion rather than a data printout. A forensic vocational expert witness is signing their professional judgment, and every section above exists to show the reasoning that judgment was built on.
Building the Report Without Rebuilding the Structure Every Time
Getting these seven sections right, in this order, with consistent formatting across every file in a caseload, is the difference between a report that reads as one firm's disciplined work product and one that reads like it was assembled from whatever template was open that week. The Forensic Loss-of-Earning-Capacity Report Kit builds this section structure in as a starting template, so the methodology and findings sections stay the focus of the drafting time instead of the formatting.
Download the Forensic Loss-of-Earning-Capacity Report Kit to start your next evaluation from a structure built for cross-examination, not just for filing.