This is a tale of a work related incident gone awry. It may be illegal work, but an on the job injury is an on the job injury. Who am I to judge? I only had to read the following opening line and my mind was off and running: “The Oklahoma Highway Patrol says a…

A case before the Montana Supreme Court will determine the legality of a 2009 law designed to force a religious sect to purchase workers’ compensation insurance. The group, known as the Hutterites, are similar to the Amish and the Mennonites, but put more emphasis on communalism and shared property. The 2009 law designed to bring them…

So what happens when a woman cannot work because a co-worker is allergic to her paprika sniffing Service Dog? Well, for starters, the employer gets sued. The city of Indianapolis is being sued by an employee who claims it refused to accommodate her service dog, which is specially trained to warn her of the presence…

Seems a bit hard to believe, but in Virginia if a worker suffers a brain injury that prevents them from remembering the accident, it is not a compensable injury under workers' compensation. Even after an attempt to correct this elephant sized loophole, the state recently ruled that a man who fell off a roof and…

It was another Claims Management session at RIMS 2012 last week in Philadelphia, and the three presenters were reviewing their top ten ways you can screw up your claim. The session, aptly titled “The Top Ten Things an Employer Can Do to Mess Up a Workers' Compensation Claim”, featured Attorney Doug Feldman of Lindner &…

An Australian woman who was injured having sex in her motel room while on a business trip has been awarded benefits for the injury. The unnamed woman was apparently injured when a light fixture fell off the wall and struck her in the face. Talk about thunder down under…… She apparently met a male friend…

It pains me a bit to write this. There are many things I like about Philadelphia. I cherish its history, as well as its culinary contributions to the realm of the sandwich; namely the Cheese Steak and the classic Hoagie. However, while I was largely impressed with the RIMS conference, the city left me with…

I heard a very interesting thing at RIMS 2012 this week. In a session entitled “Claims Triage: Identifying and Settling Big-Ticket Claims”, the panelists were sharing ideas on how to close “old dog” claims, those files that have been around forever and represent tremendous long term liabilities. Gregory Gitter, president of Gitter and Associates, while…

The annual RIMS Conference, which opens in Philadelphia this Sunday, seeks to expand awareness of risk management beyond the accepted realm of the risk professional, to help employers and the industry, in their words, “innovatively minimize risks”. It is, to me, a refreshingly innovative concept, and I look forward to seeing how their extensive agenda…

First, I must warn you this post links to an article that contains offensive language. Second, I will defend my decision to write about this because, well, it's what I do, and it beats real work. Besides, in addition to workers' compensation stuff, I write about employment related issues, and this was clearly the woman's…