If you've ever sat across from a well-resourced defendant at mediation, doing mental arithmetic while they leaf through a bound folder of actuarial reports, you know the feeling. You're presenting "global figures" based on experience and feel. They're presenting itemised schedules with footnotes. Both of you know your number is probably right — but only one of you looks like they've done the work.
I'm a personal injury lawyer with over ten years of experience, primarily acting for institutional abuse survivors in NSW. Early in my career, I started building a damages calculator to solve exactly this problem. That tool became Claim Cal. This is the story of why it exists, why it went away for a while, and why I brought it back.
Where it started
When you act for institutional abuse survivors, you're almost always up against well-resourced opponents. Government agencies, large insurers, religious institutions with deep pockets and experienced legal teams. They have the manpower and money to throw at cases. They can commission actuarial reports, brief barristers for every interlocutory step, and produce polished schedules of damages as a matter of course.
Most plaintiff firms — and certainly most sole practitioners — don't have those resources. You're running dozens of files, often on spec, and the economics of each matter don't always justify commissioning a formal actuarial report. But that doesn't mean your clients deserve less rigour in how their claims are quantified.
Before I became a lawyer, I studied engineering. When I saw how much time I was spending on manual calculations — looking up RBA cash rates for pre-judgment interest, pulling ABS earnings data for economic loss, running tax calculations by hand — I thought: this should be automated. Not because the work isn't important, but because the important work is the analysis and advocacy, not the arithmetic.
So I built the first version. It was called LawLite — a damages calculator and economic loss analyser that let me build schedules quickly, iterate on assumptions, and produce defensible figures without needing to brief an actuary for every matter. It worked. I used it on my own files, and other practitioners started using it on their matters too (it was a nice feeling to have barrister friends tell me they saw teh reports from my app showing up in their briefs).
The pivot to Hivelight — and why we came back
LawLite eventually pivoted to become Hivelight. We felt that damages calcualtions might be too niche, and that the more fundamental need and problem to solve in legal practice was work management - as in bringing project management to legal work. The thinking was sound: a full legal project management platform would have broader appeal and be jurisdictionally agnostic. You don't need to research the specifics of NSW pre-judgment interest rates or Victorian attendant care calculations if you're building a case management system. It would be easier to scale internationally without having to build out jurisdiction-specific calculation logic for every state and territory.
But something kept happening. Lawyers — plaintiff and defendant side alike — kept asking about the standalone calculation tools. "Can I just use the damages calculator?" "Is the economic loss analyser still available?" "I don't need case management, I just need something for mediations."
The demand was clear. The calculation tools solved a specific, painful problem that general practice management software doesn't address. Practitioners weren't looking for another platform to manage their entire practice. They wanted sharp, purpose-built tools that helped them do better work on individual matters.
So I made the decision to bring them back. Not as a side feature of a larger platform, but as the main event. Rebuilt from scratch with a modern technology stack, an expanded tool set, and a few years of additional experience informing the design. That's Claim Cal.
What Claim Cal does differently
Claim Cal gives you three integrated tools in one case-based interface. You create a case, and all three tools share the same matter context — party names, jurisdiction, date of injury. No re-entering data across separate spreadsheets.
Damages calculator
Build a complete schedule of damages across all heads of damage — general damages, past and future medical expenses, past and future economic loss, domestic assistance, attendant care, fund management, and more. The calculator handles pre-judgment interest automatically using the RBA cash rate plus 4% (the standard NSW formula), computes discount multipliers for future losses using the prescribed discount rate, and maintains a running grand total as you build your schedule.
When you're done, export the entire schedule to Word. You get a formatted document you can file, serve, or hand across the bar table at mediation.
Economic loss calculator
Past and future earnings analysis is where most of the complexity lives in personal injury claims, and it's where the economic loss calculator earns its keep. It pulls ABS Average Weekly Earnings data (the weighted average across survey periods), applies current tax rates and superannuation, and lets you model different earnings scenarios for both the injured and uninjured positions.
Instead of a wall of numbers in a spreadsheet, you get visual charts that show the earnings differential over time. You can adjust assumptions — different pre-injury earning capacity, different residual earning capacity, different retirement ages — and see immediately how they affect the total claim. This makes it a powerful tool for testing the sensitivity of your arguments before you present them.
Settlement tracker
This is the tool I wished I'd had at every mediation I've ever attended. The settlement tracker is a live negotiation tool that lets you track offers and counter-offers in real time, calculate take-home figures after legal costs and disbursements, and run gap analysis between the parties' positions.
It works in both plaintiff and defendant modes. On the plaintiff side, you can show your client exactly what they'll receive after costs at any given settlement figure. On the defendant side, you can track the plaintiff's movement and model where you think the matter might land. It enables real-time client communication — instead of stepping out to "run the numbers," you can show your client the position as it develops.
Why visual matters more than you think
Human beings process visual information faster and more intuitively than tables of numbers. The same principle applies at mediation, in settlement conferences, and in any negotiation where you need people to understand a position quickly.
When you present a global figure — "we say the claim is worth $850,000" — the other side has nothing to engage with except the number itself. They can dismiss it, counter it, or accept it, but they can't interrogate it. When you present an itemised schedule with breakdowns by head of damage, pre-judgment interest calculations tied to specific RBA cash rates, and economic loss charts showing the earnings differential over a working life, the conversation changes. They have to engage with your methodology, not just your number.
This matters for three reasons.
Client trust. Your client can see the detail of your preparation. They can see that you haven't pulled a figure from thin air — you've built it up from component parts, each of which is defensible. This builds confidence in your advice, particularly when you're counselling them to accept (or reject) a settlement offer. Institutional abuse survivors, in particular, often have deep-seated distrust of authority figures. Showing them the working behind your advice can be genuinely therapeutic.
Iteration. At mediation, the numbers move. The other side raises a contributory negligence argument you hadn't fully priced in. Your barrister suggests discounting future economic loss by an additional 15% for vicissitudes. With visual tools, you can role-play different risk scenarios in real time and show your client how they affect the outcome. Instead of "trust me, this is still a good result," you can show them exactly why.
Credibility. Defensible, itemised offers carry more weight than round numbers based on feel. When your schedule shows that you've calculated pre-judgment interest at 7.35% based on the RBA cash rate for the relevant period, applied the 5% discount rate to future losses, and used current ABS AWE data for the earnings analysis, the other side knows you've done the work. It's harder to push back on a number that's transparently derived than one that appears to have been chosen for its roundness.
Built for both sides of the bar table
Claim Cal isn't exclusively a plaintiff tool. If you're acting for a defendant or an insurer, you need the same calculations — you're just approaching them from the other direction. You need to test the plaintiff's schedule, model your own assessment of liability and quantum, and calculate what a reasonable settlement looks like from your client's perspective.
The settlement tracker's defendant mode lets you do exactly that. Track the plaintiff's offers, model your own position, and calculate the gap. The damages calculator and economic loss analyser work the same way regardless of which side you're on — the mathematics of pre-judgment interest and earnings loss don't change depending on who's paying.
And it's not just about the numbers. Defendant practitioners tell me that having a structured assessment tool helps them manage client expectations more effectively. When an insurer asks "why can't we just offer $200,000?" you can walk them through the schedule component by component and show them exactly where the risk sits. That's a more productive conversation than arguing about gut feelings.
More broadly, Claim Cal works for any legal action involving a claim for damages. Personal injury is the core use case, but if you're quantifying losses in a contractual dispute, a professional negligence claim, or any other proceeding where damages need to be calculated, the tools are just as useful. If you come across heads of damage we don't currently offer, let us know and we'll add them.
Try it — 3 free cases, no time limit
I built Claim Cal because I needed it. I'm making it available because other practitioners need it too.
The pricing is simple: you get 3 free cases to experiment with all the tools — the damages calculator, the economic loss calculator, and the settlement tracker. No time limit, no feature restrictions. Use them on real matters or just explore. After that, it's $99 inc GST per case. That's a disbursement you can pass through to your client, and it's a fraction of what you'd pay for an actuarial report.
No subscriptions. No platform fees. No pressure. Just sharp tools for practitioners who want to do better work.
If you have questions, feature requests, I'm always happy to hear from practitioners. This is a tool built by a lawyer for lawyers, and it gets better with every conversation (email ashley+claimcal@hivelight.com).