Welcome to Economica, a Calgary-based consulting firm specializing in the calculation of damages in personal injury and fatal accident litigation. In the forty years since our founding, we have written reports on more than five thousand files and have testified in court more than one hundred times.

Since 1996, we have published The Expert Witness, a newsletter in which we report the results of the latest research into issues that are of interest to the personal injury litigator. To date, almost 150 articles have appeared in The Expert Witness, all of which are available on this website.

For more information about us and the services we provide, see the appropriate links. If you think you would like to retain us, we also have some checklists that outline the type of information we like to have in order to prepare various types of assessments.

News from Economica

• March 25, 2021: Kelly, Derek, and Laura presented at the Alberta Civil Trial Lawyers Association 35th Anniversary Webinar Series – Economics Lunch & Learn.
  • Kelly’s presentation topic was Without- and With- accident income: Total Compensation
  • Derek’s presentation topic was Loss of Income for Self-Employed Plaintiffs
  • Laura’s presentation topic was Income Replacement Benefits
    • Thanks to ACTLA for the opportunity to participate in this event.
• COVID-19: Our office remains closed most days, and Derek, Kelly, and Laura continue to work from home. One of us comes into the office at least once a week to collect mail and packages. Couriers are able to leave packages with building security in the lobby. Phone calls to our direct lines and to the main office line will go to voicemail and we will receive the voicemails by email and get back to you shortly. Thanks for your consideration.
• • • • Derek Aldridge – derek@economica.ca – 403-297-0015
      • Kelly Rathje – kelly@economica.ca – 403-297-0016
      • Laura Weir – laura@economica.ca – 403-297-0010

• Economica will be closed January 1, 2020 – Happy New Year!
• Economica will be closed December 23, 2019, through December 27, 2019. Happy Holidays!
• October 02, 2019: The latest (6th) edition of the “Assessment of Personal Injury Damages” book written by C. Bruce, K. Rathje, and L. Weir,  is available for purchase through LexisNexis.
• August 01, 2019: Published the Summer 2019 edition of the Expert Witness Newsletter (volume 23, issue 1)
• July 15, 2019: Mailed the Summer 2019 edition of the Expert Witness Newsletter (volume 23, issue 1)
• Economica will be closed December 24th through January 2nd 2019.
• December 14, 2018: Updated Newsletters to feature the 2018 Expert Witness Newsletter Articles
• December 01, 2018: Mailed the 2018 Fall Edition of the Expert Witness Newsletter (volume 22, issue 3)
• December 01, 2018: Christopher Bruce’s article “Cross versus Sole Dependency” was published in Vol. 155 of the B.C. Trial Lawyers’ Association journal, The Verdict.
• December 01, 2018: Christopher Bruce, Derek Aldridge, Kelly Rathje, and Laura Weir are currently preparing the sixth edition of Assessment of Personal Injury Damages. Publication is expected for summer 2019.
• September 2018: Derek Aldridge and Christopher Bruce published an article titled “Estimating the Impact of Mid-Career Retraining” in the Journal of Legal Economics, Vol. 21 (1-2)
• August 24, 2018: Mailed the 2018 Summer Edition of the Expert Witness Newsletter (volume 22, issue 2)
• July 24, 2017: Our office is open again.
• July 21, 2017: Please note that our office building has been shut down since Wednesday afternoon due to an electrical failure. Hopefully it will be open by Monday July 24. Nobody will be answering our office phone, but Derek, Kelly, and Laura are available by email.
• May 2017: We will soon be publishing and mailing the Spring 2017 issue of our newsletter, The Expert Witness. It contains one article, Selecting the Discount Rate (2017), which is now available on our website.
• In the Fall of 2016, Economica prepared assessments of damages in two precedent-setting cases involving indigenous plaintiffs: Kelly v. Canada – an important residential schools case – and Brown v. Canada – an Ontario “sixties scoop” case.
• Our June 2016 newsletter included the article The Structure of a Cost of Care Report. In it, Dr. Bruce and Ms. Rathje provide an economist’s perspective on various issues that arise in the presentation of cost of care reports. These include issues such as incremental costs, requirements that will vary over a plaintiff’s lifetime, the approach to ranges of estimates for costs or replacement frequencies, the costs of housekeepers and personal care attendants, and presentation. They also provide a sample calculation, to illustrate the issues discussed in the article.
• The second article from our June 2016 newsletter was titled The Effect of Incarceration on Future Earnings. In this article, Dr. Bruce and Mr. Aldridge find that the literature regarding the effect of a criminal record on income suggests incarceration has a relatively small effect on lifetime earnings. Those who have been incarcerated tend to have lower levels of income than those without a criminal record, not because incarceration has changed their vocational/economic outcomes, but because they are drawn from a group with relatively low income to begin with. Further, the length of a person’s incarceration (holding the severity of the crime constant) appeared to have little impact on earnings, except in the case of “white collar” crime such as fraud or embezzlement. The literature suggests that individuals with supportive family ties, such as those living with their spouses and children, were the most successful at transitioning back into the workforce. In addition, the likelihood of recidivism decreased as an individual aged (i.e., those 30 and 40 year olds who were incarcerated in their early 20s are not likely to become repeat offenders).