It is said that good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment. This pithy aphorism is generally true in life but is particularly true when a company sees significantly increased workers’ compensation insurance premiums following a serious workers’ compensation claim. The same is true even if the claim was not the employer’s…
Details
California is facing particularly severe wildfires this fall, with multiple fires raging across the state. These fires have led to widespread damage, including property loss, environmental destruction, and health hazards. On September 8, the Bridge Fire began in the Angeles National Forest. It exploded in size to over 50,000 acres, the cause of which is…
Details
The author, Franz Kafka, known for his dark situations which many people relate to, once wrote a very short story about omnipotent power floating just beyond our reach. You go to the city to see the law. Upon arrival outside the law building, there is a guard who says “You may not pass without permission.”…
Details
A Texas House Committee confirmed last week that a rotting and decayed utility pole that broke, causing power wires to fall on dry grass in the Texas Panhandle on February 26, sparked the Smokehouse Creek Fire, the largest and costliest wildfire in Texas history, and the largest U.S. wildfire in 2024. This confirms our initial…
Details
In December we reported on the anti-subrogation climate in Missouri and the Court of Appeals decision in Thomas v. Ramushi, which held that, absent a “direct assignment”, an insurer has no authority to seek a property subrogation payment from the tortfeasor without the insured’s consent.[1] That decision highlighted the important distinction between a subrogation clause…
Details
In a rare example of how strong a workers’ compensation statutory lien can be, a Pennsylvania appellate court affirmed a ruling by a Workers’ Compensation Judge (affirmed by the Workers’ Compensation Appeal Board (WCAB)) in which a workers’ compensation carrier was allowed to recover its full $45,530.48 lien out of the employee’s $675,000 third-party settlement,…
Details
A Delaware court has thrown a small blanket of precedent over the smoldering embers of claims by some insureds with large deductibles that their insurance company is guilty of bad faith if it does not attempt to subrogate and recover the insured’s deductible. On August 2, 2020, Praveen Patel’s house located at 403 Derby Way,…
Details
We are still years away from full implementation of true self-driving cars in the U.S., but each step we take dramatically complicates and changes the face of auto claims handling, vehicle repairs, and subrogation litigation. When catastrophic claims are paid as a result of a traffic accident resulting from a failure of an automated driving…
Details
In one of our most widely-reprinted and widely-read articles, “Ten Subrogation Mistakes Insurance Companies Keep Making”, the number one most prevalent and most costly mistake is waiting too long to involve subrogation counsel. It sounds like an MWL marketing pitch, and of course, in many ways it is. But it is also the truth. The…
Details
It’s the question every claims professional and trial attorney claims to know but few fully understand. In addition to paying for medical expenses, death benefits, funeral costs and/or indemnity benefits for lost wages resulting from a compensable injury, workers’ compensation insurance carriers also expend considerable dollars for case management costs, medical bill audit fees, independent…
Details