FROM LEFT: Prof Derek Chadee (Deputy Principal of UWI St Augustine), Justice Winston Anderson (President of the Caribbean Court of Justice), Justice Nirala Bansee-Sookhai (Deputy Chair of the Judicial Education Institute of Trinidad and Tobago), Lynette Seebaran-Suite (President of the Law Association of Trinidad and Tobago), Stokeley Smart (Director and Senior Lecturer of the Actuarial Science Programme at UWI St Augustine), Justice Nadia Kangaloo, Kyle Rudden (Managing Director of KR Services Limited), and members of The Smart Tables®️ team, Anysha Thomas and Zara-Leigh Lewis, at the Main Salon of the Office of the Campus Principal.
Personal injuries, loss of life—almost every day, judges are required to make rulings on a host on matters that involve financial compensation. In December 2025, a tool was launched at UWI St Augustine to make it easier for judges to fairly calculate these judgments: The Smart Tables®.
The ceremony was held at the Main Salon of the Campus Principal’s Office.
The Smart Tables® was developed after UWI St Augustine Actuarial Science Senior Lecturer and Director Stokeley Smart and High Court Judge Justice Nadia Kangaloo recognised the need for an accessible, localised tool to assist judges. They assembled a team of academics, professionals and postgraduate students that worked over eight years to develop The Smart Tables®.
The tool is a framework designed to be used by the courts to assist in quantifying the lump-sum valuation of loss of future earnings due to personal injury or death. A Caribbean Actuarial Association research grant of over US$13,000 supported work on the project.
During his remarks, Smart explained, “The key inputs for the framework to render calculations on financial judgments are mortality, and interest rate assumptions. Therefore, it will look at factors such as age, gender and inflation, etc.
“Given this, it was important for The Smart Tables® to be put together by a group that comprised representatives from stakeholder organisations with representative expertise.”
Members of the working group that refined the finalised framework included economist Dr Vaalmikki Arjoon, Simone Balkissoon of the Caribbean Actuarial Association, UWI Actuarial Science lecturer Brendon Bhagwandeen, High Court Judge Justice Christopher Sieuchand, Representative of the Law Association of Trinidad and Tobago Ramnarine Mungroo, and Ronnie Vinda Persad of the Assembly of Southern Lawyers.
Alumni of the UWI St Augustine Actuarial Science programme that contributed work to the development of the tables included Arianna Ali, Kristal Boodram, Valsson Tobias, Cyrus Lakhan, Chandini Gunpat, Zara-Leigh Lewis, and Shastri Singh Doodnath.
Other members of The Smart Tables® Team that also contributed to the development of framework are Tanya Carter, Amy Khan, John Noel and Anysha Thomas.
The tables were peer-reviewed by Chris Daykin and Justice Martha Alexander.
Smart added, “It really was a tour-de-force of multidisciplinary expertise.
“In parallel with the creation of The Smart Tables®, we also had to create the mortality tables input as they did not previously exist. So, that was something that went on in parallel that we synthesised from scratch as a critical input of The Smart Tables® framework.”
A publicly available website (thesmarttables.com) is the medium through which the framework has been made accessible to all. It includes a user-friendly calculator.
Justice Kangaloo shared that a presentation on The Smart Tables® was given to the Judiciary of Trinidad and Tobago in 2024 at the request of former Chief Justice Ivor Archie.
She said, “I’m very enthusiastic about the methodology of The Smart Tables®. It gives me great pleasure from the perspective of a sitting judge, a practitioner of over 20 years’ experience, and just generally as a human being interacting with the court system, to be able to have The Smart Tables® in use.”
Kangaloo said the team will continue to take The Smart Tables® on a “roadshow”, as they did in 2023 in Australia and around the Caribbean, to show that it can be applicable to other jurisdictions, which expands the reach of and support for the tool.
During his remarks at the launch, Kyle Rudden, a Fellow of the prestigious Society of Actuaries and current Managing Director of KR Services Limited, who also worked on the tables, said The Smart Tables® are a welcomed asset to the local judiciary given that an analogous framework has been used in the United Kingdom since 1984, the Ogden Tables.
In 2023, the team did a presentation on The Smart Tables® at the International Congress of Actuaries in Sydney, and it attracted interest from stakeholders in several other countries.
“So, the methodology is one that can be applied in any common-law jurisdiction that does not have an existing framework,” added Rudden.
