Occupational Disease Claims: Building Industrial Causation
Occupational disease claims differ from traumatic injury claims in how causation is established and how the medical record is developed. Th…
Category
Workers' Comp
Workers' compensation in California — WCAB rulings, MPN/QME procedure, third-party PI coordination, and the practice-side of comp claims.
Temporary Disability Benefit Disputes in California Workers' Comp
California temporary disability benefits are more frequently disputed than they should be, and the rules governing their calculation, payme…
Clearing the Psychiatric Injury Threshold Under Labor Code 3208.3
California Labor Code 3208.3 imposes requirements on psychiatric injury claims that have no counterpart in physical injury cases. Understan…
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…
Winning the Firefighter Cancer Presumption: Burden-Shifting for Safety Members
Statutory presumptions convert a firefighter's cancer diagnosis from a contested causation fight into an employer's burden to rebut. Here i…
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…
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 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 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…
Beating the Post-Termination Psych Claim Bar Under 3208.3
Labor Code 3208.3 presumes a post-termination psychiatric claim non-compensable. The exceptions that actually defeat the bar, and the recor…
Pricing the Medicare Set-Aside Into a Comp Settlement
The Medicare set-aside decides the client's net as much as the gross settlement does. How to size it, fund it, and build it into intake ins…
Rebutting the Strict AMA Guides Rating Under Almaraz/Guzman
The impairment rating decides the permanent disability award, and in California the strict AMA Guides number is not the last word. Almaraz/…