Chris Maragos was a special teams player for the Eagles. He recently won a $40 million dollar verdict in Philadelphia against Rothman Institute in which he claimed that their failure to properly evaluate a meniscus tear in his knee cost him years of football earnings. His lost earnings made the number far higher than any other individual would normally see.
Lost earnings are very hard to prove for many people. If you are W-2 employee, they are fairly straightforward. Many people these days are not W-2 employees and it is very, very hard to prove lost earnings in those situations. I once had a client very mad at me because they felt that their real estate commission income was not fairly valued in a settlement conference. The client had earned about $75,000 per year in commissions as a realtor. But, the case occurred in 2010, in the middle of a terrible real estate downturn, when no houses were selling. It was very hard to justify a lost earnings value in that case, but the client definitely had lost earnings. Whether we could prove causation, or whether the earnings loss was caused by her injury was very problematic. Eventually, the client was pissed off, but accepted the settlement offered. I have not heard from them since then suggesting that they still felt aggrieved by their lost earnings.