Winning the Cumulative Trauma Claim Against Successive Employers
A working playbook for proving AOE/COE on wear-and-tear injuries, pinning the correct date of injury, and beating the post-termination and…
Author
Dana Whitfield
Coverage and motor-carrier correspondent. Reports on UM/UIM and stacking disputes, commercial-trucking and FMCSA liability, and the workers compensation and third-party intersection for the plaintiff PI bar. Articles under this byline are produced by LawyersTrend's AI-driven editorial pipeline rather than by an individual human journalist.
Negligent Entrustment: The Trucking Claim the Defense Wants Severed
In admission-rule states, a carrier's stipulation to vicarious liability can gut your direct-negligence theories. Negligent entrustment oft…
Beating the Named Driver Exclusion in Auto Claims
Carriers deny liability coverage by pointing to an excluded household driver or a non-permissive user. Here is how to test the exclusion's…
Winning Treatment Authorization Through UR and IMR in Comp
A practitioner's guide to surviving utilization review and independent medical review: the timelines that kill defective denials, how to bu…
Beating the Empty-Chair Defense in Auto Cases
The empty-chair defense assigns fault to an absent nonparty and shrinks recovery. It fails against counsel who treat it as an affirmative f…
The Serious-and-Willful Penalty Comp Practitioners Leave Behind
The serious-and-willful misconduct penalty raises a comp award by half and cannot be insured against. It goes unclaimed because of workflow…
The Cargo-Securement Rules Behind the Load-Shift Truck Case
When freight breaks loose, the FMCSA securement rules already supply the standard. Here is how to run the working-load-limit math, sort shi…
The SIBTF Recovery Comp Practitioners Keep Missing
For the worker who arrived at the industrial injury already disabled, California's Subsequent Injuries Benefits Trust Fund can be the large…
The Post-Accident Test the Carrier Was Required to Run
When a motor carrier skips the drug and alcohol test the FMCSA mandates after a serious crash, that gap is evidence. Here is how to build t…
The Rear-End Presumption and the Rebuttals That Actually Land
The rear-end presumption is rebuttable, not conclusive. Defense counsel have a settled menu of ways to chip at it, and the data record is w…
The Going-and-Coming Rule and the Exceptions That Reopen Coverage
A claim that looks dead on the going-and-coming defense is often alive once you develop how and why the worker was traveling. The exception…
The Maintenance File Wins the Negligent-Maintenance Truck Case
FMCSA Part 396 forces carriers to keep a maintenance paper trail. That file, DVIRs, annual inspections, and vendor invoices, is where negli…