Dackman v. Robinson: Maryland's High Court Protects Lost Earning Capacity Experts in Lead Paint Cases
For a child poisoned by lead paint, the deepest injury is often invisible on any X-ray: the future that was taken. Cognitive deficits from childhood lead exposure follow a person through school, into the job market, and across an entire working life. Putting a number on that stolen future — what the child would have earned but for the poisoning — is one of the hardest and most important tasks in a lead case. Late last month, the Court of Appeals of Maryland handed down a decision that protects the way it gets done.
The decision
In Dackman v. Robinson, decided June 24, 2019 (opinion by Judge Watts), the Court of Appeals affirmed a judgment for a lead-paint plaintiff that included over $1 million in lost earning capacity. 464 Md. 189, 211 A.3d 307 (2019).
The landlord's appeal took aim at the plaintiff's damages experts — the vocational rehabilitation expert and the economist who translated diminished capacity into dollars. The defense theme was a familiar one in lead litigation: that opinions about what a poisoned child "would have" achieved are speculation dressed up as expertise, and that experts must marshal statistical studies before opining on a plaintiff's lost potential.
It is an argument with real rhetorical appeal — no one can know with certainty what any child's life would have held. But the law has never demanded certainty about the future; it demands a reasoned, factually grounded estimate. Juries project lost futures in every wrongful death and catastrophic injury case tried in Maryland. The question in Dackman was whether lead plaintiffs specifically would be saddled with a heavier evidentiary burden than everyone else.
The Court of Appeals disagreed. It held that there was a sufficient factual basis for the vocational expert's opinion that lead-caused cognitive deficits reduced the plaintiff to a sub-high-school earning capacity. And it declined to impose the defense's proposed requirement: lead-paint cases do not require experts to assemble statistical studies in order to opine on what the plaintiff would have achieved absent the injury. The expert's grounding in the plaintiff's own records, testing, and background — the standard methodology in these cases — was enough to support the verdict.
Why the damages fight is the real fight
Liability in Baltimore lead cases has its own battles — we wrote in 2016 about Rowhouses, Inc. v. Smith, which preserved circumstantial proof that a particular property was a source of exposure (see our April 2016 post). But experienced defense counsel know that even when liability is likely, gutting the damages case can shrink a claim to a fraction of its value. The lost-earning-capacity opinion is the single largest number in most lead verdicts, so it draws the heaviest fire.
The typical proof model works like this:
| Step | Expert | What they establish |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pediatric/neuropsychology experts | The child's lead exposure caused measurable cognitive deficits |
| 2 | Vocational rehabilitation expert | Those deficits translate into reduced educational attainment and a lower earning track |
| 3 | Economist | The gap between the earnings trajectory absent injury and the actual trajectory, reduced to present value |
Dackman is a ruling that this model — anchored in the plaintiff's own testing, records, and family/educational background — rests on a legally sufficient foundation. Had the defense's statistical-studies requirement been adopted, it would have added an expensive, and in many cases impossible, hurdle between poisoned children and full compensation.
What this means for injured people in Maryland
- Full-value claims remain viable. A lead case in Maryland can and should claim the whole injury — not just medical costs and pain, but the lifetime earnings difference that cognitive injury causes.
- The expert playbook is intact. Plaintiffs' vocational and economic experts can continue to build opinions on the individual child's records and testing without importing population-level statistical studies for every opinion.
- Documentation matters early. School records, IEPs, standardized testing, and neuropsychological evaluations become the factual basis these experts need. Families should preserve everything.
- The stakes are generational. For a young adult plaintiff, a properly proven earning-capacity claim often dwarfs every other element of damages. Dackman keeps that door open.
And because Dackman was an affirmance, its immediate meaning for this plaintiff is the most important kind: the judgment stands. After years of litigation and appeal, the compensation the jury awarded for a diminished working life is finally secure. For the broader docket of pending lead cases in Maryland courts, the decision is now controlling authority the defense bar must live with.
Lead paint litigation exists because, for decades, children — overwhelmingly in Baltimore's oldest and poorest housing — absorbed a poison their landlords could have abated. The measure of justice in these cases is whether the compensation matches the true, lifelong scope of the harm. This decision helps make sure it can.
If you or a loved one has been hurt, call Posey Lebowitz at (202) 524-0123 or send us a message for a free consultation.
Part of our DMV case law archive, compiled in 2026 to reflect the archive of some of the most important decisions in injury law.
Update: In August 2020, Maryland adopted the Daubert standard for expert admissibility in Rochkind v. Stevenson; Dackman's holdings on the sufficiency of lost-earning-capacity proof were not disturbed.