Third-Party Cause Of Action No Longer Automatically Assigned To Employee After One Year In a mysterious legal sleight of hand that would make David Copperfield envious, the Arizona Court of Appeals has reinvented the English language by making it possible to reassign something that wasn’t assigned in the first place. In Acosta v. Kiewit-Sundt, 2014…
Drastic Re-Write of Comp Law Provides New Subrogation Options In the 1970s, the Oklahoma Sooners’ football team successfully began implementing a new offensive system known as the “option offense.” Sooner Coach Barry Switzer has been credited by many for having perfected the use of the wishbone offense, a staple of option offenses. Forty years later,…
It is said that releases and settlement agreements “use a hundred words when ten would do” and there is a good reason for that. Those drafting the release want to include as much as possible within the future protections, claims released, and indemnity provided by the document. Conversely, those signing the release want to limit…
If you think the recent Congressional civil war over cutting entitlements and spending, raising the debt ceiling (again), and funding Obamacare was a melee, welcome to the ongoing dispute in Pennsylvania over whether a workers’ compensation carrier can initiate the filing of a third-party lawsuit. It’s the usual suspects: trial lawyers vs. subrogation professionals. However,…
Subrogation of Occupational Disease Claims Eliminated “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” – Al Pacino, Godfather III. In 2005, Missouri amended its statutes and divorced the compensability of occupational disease claims from its statutory workers’ compensation definitions of “accident” and “injury.” A few years later, in the case of…
In one of my favorite Seinfeld episodes[1], a frightened Kramer is lost and calls Jerry from a phone booth somewhere in Manhattan. Jerry asks him to look around for a street sign and Kramer responds with a touch of panic that he is at the intersection of 1st Street and 1st Avenue, concluding that he…
When an employee is involved in a motor vehicle accident while in the course and scope of his employment and the at-fault tortfeasor is uninsured or underinsured, the question arises as to whether the employee can recover under his employer’s uninsured or underinsured motorist (UM/UIM) policy as well as recover workers’ compensation benefits. We recently…
In many respects it is as daunting and elusive as the search for the Holy Grail. All 50 states allow for recovery of workers’ compensation benefits paid to or on behalf of a claimant injured in the course of his or her employment. Not a single one, however, enunciates precisely which payments or costs paid…
Waiver of subrogation. (wā-vər əv sə-brō-ˈgā-shən) 1. A two sentence clauses in a contract and/or endorsement to a workers’ compensation policy added for little or no additional premium dollars but costing the carrier potentially millions in subrogation recoveries. 2. Something requested by an insured even though it has no idea why. Waivers of subrogation continue…
The Mississippi Supreme Court recently dropped a bombshell and announced that in order to be reimbursed for its statutory workers’ compensation lien, a workers’ compensation carrier or employer must intervene into the third-party action. Liberty Mutual Ins. Co. v. Shoemake, 2013 WL 1831793 (Miss., May 2, 2013). If it does not do so, its subrogation…