I wanted share with you a rather interesting mediation I attend last week. I don't want to use the site to talk about specific claims but this was an interesting claim. The client had an employee who had a back injury that required surgery. This was a good employee who had worked for this company for about 5 years. When the employee was released to come back in a transitional capacity, the employer not only accommodated his physical restrictions he actually brought him back in the office and was teaching him how to estimate jobs. This new job skill would result in a 25% increase in his preinjury rate. Well a couple weeks later at a family BBQ he is told he needs an attorney and he retains one. So we now have mediation and the settlement demand is North of 200,000. During the mediation the employee was asked does the company run a safe operation and the answer was yes. Next the employee was asked does the employer and namely the employee show care and concern for his employee’s and the answer was a resounding yes. So I wondered (probably out loud) why the employee ever retained an attorney. The exposure on this claim (at its worst case scenario if the employer did not offer light duty) was less than half of the demand. The problem is the claimant now thinks his claim is worth 200,000. He is released to come back to work and only has a PPD rating of 5%. The second troublesome thing is the attorney in question repeatedly has told the employee that if he returns to work (and gets past the 15 day trial work period) that the employer will terminate the employee. I tried to rationalize why the employee would feel this way since the employer was teaching him a new job skill (why would he bother if he was going to terminate????). There are a lot of conclusions you could draw from this blog but the one thing that stood out to me is the employer has a window to build credibility with an injured employee. Once an employee gets outside of the employers circle of influence then it will be very hard to ever build trust again (even if the employer and the adjuster does everything right). With a tight labor market those employee’s taking settlements (accompanied by a resignation letter) may be behind the eight ball when their settlement money runs out and they have to go back out and find a job. We will be doing a poll (from our website) in May to get your feedback about the trends you see in the Georgia Workers’ Compensation claims.
Oh, you probably want to know what happened with the claim. Tune into my next blog.
Steve