Abbott

This appeal is brought by a personal injury plaintiff who contends a jury award for economic damages ($17,300) is inadequate as a matter of law because her vocational rehabilitation expert testified it would cost more than $115,000 to retrain her for less strenuous employment. In a takeoff on “baseball arbitration,” plaintiff claims the jury was obliged to either accept or reject this expert testimony on a take-it-or-leave-it basis because there was no competing expert to offer different numbers.

Plaintiff suggests the following rule of law: “[Wjhen an expert witness testifies to specific dollar amounts, and not to a range of dollar amounts, for particular types of economic damages, and the jury’s award is not consistent with any of those specific amounts, either alone or added together, the jury has arbitrarily and improperly disregarded that expert’s testimony [1Q . . . [The jury] could either accept or reject the expert’s figures; they could not substitute new figures, because there was no evidence from which new amounts could be drawn.”

There is no such rule. Plaintiff forgets that between black and white are various shades of gray, and all of the colors of the…