Illinois’s employment-damages framework draws most of its force from the Illinois Human Rights Act and the Wage Payment and Collection Act. The IHRA’s scope and the WPCA’s breadth of what counts as “final compensation” together shape the economic expert’s scope in most large matters.
Chicago financial-services compensation
Proprietary trading firms, exchanges, and derivatives market-makers produce compensation structures unlike those seen on the coasts. Discretionary bonus driven by desk or pod P&L dominates; base salary is often modest by comparable-role standards. The damages model reconstructs the plaintiff’s share of desk economics from documented allocation methodology.
For plaintiffs at private-equity and real-estate fund managers, carried interest and promote structures follow the same year-by-year waterfall treatment applied elsewhere.
Mitigation
Chicago’s senior-professional labor market is deep but narrower than New York’s for certain specialties. For plaintiffs in niche derivatives, trading, or fund-of-funds roles, imputed mitigation requires specific market evidence rather than broad occupational averages.
State-specific worklife factors
Illinois worklife expectancy tracks closely with national averages. Sectoral adjustment matters more than jurisdictional adjustment here.
Worklife & discount-rate notes
Chicago's finance and commercial real estate sectors produce complex compensation structures, particularly at the private-equity, trading-firm, and derivatives-exchange level. Trading-firm compensation is often heavily discretionary and tied to desk P&L; this requires modeling that traces historical realized comp against documented desk performance.
