All News

Actuarial evidence with a twist

About 10 years ago I received a call from a lawyer looking for help in determining the expected number of members in a class action. It was a historical action dating back to the 1940s. My mandate was to determine the number of Indigenous children who attended one of several schools from the 1940s to the 1990s. That number, then, was to be split between surviving and deceased students as of 2010. A simple calculation: determine the number of graduating students from each school in each year and apply survivorship probabilities.
But there were three particularly interesting and challenging aspects to the mandate that made it anything but simple.