Florida Injury Attorney Blawg

The following editorial was published on January 16, 2018, in the Tampa Bay Times newspaper. It is fair and balanced. ***************************** Editorial: Balancing the playing field for workers’ compensation For the longest time, injured workers in Florida were basically at the mercy of the whims of employers to treat them fairly. A 2003 law aimed…

Section 440.15(4)(e) of the Florida Statutes provides as follows: “If the employee is terminated from postinjury employment based on the employee’s misconduct, temporary partial disability benefits are not payable as provided for in this section.” Simple enough, right? Not necessarily. For starters, 440.15(4)(e) is qualified by section 440.02(18), which provides in pertinent part as follows:…

Workers’ compensation claimants have the burden of showing that the workplace accident is the major contributing cause of an injury. Section 440.09(1), Florida Statutes (2017). Major contributing cause, or MCC, means the cause which is more than 50 percent responsible for the injury as compared to all other causes combined for which treatment or benefits…

Florida law grants workers’ compensation insurance companies the exclusive authority to control the selection of the injured worker’s treating medical providers. Section 440.13(2), Florida Statutes (2017). This leads to carriers repeatedly selecting providers with a track record of siding with them. Thankfully, the authority is not unbridled. One of the main restrictions concerns the proximity…

Various Florida statutes require court approval of wrongful death settlements and settlements involving minors (if the amounts received in the aggregate exceed $15,000; See Section 744.301(2), Florida Statutes (2017)). Does this mean that settlements in these situations cannot be negotiated to resolution by the parties without first obtaining court approval? The answer is that the…

Florida’s experience with crafting workers’ compensation legislation is a case study in the danger of accepting without challenge the statements of insurance industry lobbyists. One after the other during Florida’s last legislative session (March – May, 2017), insurance industry lobbyists stood before committees of elected officials and made baseless comments for the simple purpose of…

Making a first party insurance claim is not always the only or even the best option available to a person or corporation whose property has been damaged by wind or rain. (A first party claim is made by a policy holder to his or her own insurance company. These claims are contractual; meaning that they…

Wikipedia defines a functional capacity evaluation (FCE) as “a set of tests, practices and observations that are combined to determine the ability of the evaluated person to function in a variety of circumstances, most often employment, in an objective manner. Physicians change diagnoses based on FCEs.” I, for one, consider FCEs junk science. At the…

Every property damage insurance policy issued in Florida requires the insured to provide the insurance company (or, in some instances, the procuring policy agent) with timely notice of a loss. The notice requirement enables the insurer to conduct a timely and adequate investigation of all circumstances surrounding an accident. Bankers Insurance Company v. Macias, 475…

Most homeowner and commercial residential insurance policies obligate policyholders to participate in a potentially expensive and time-consuming adversarial appraisal procedure before litigation. Here’s an example, from Allstate Insurance Company v. Suarez, 833 So. 2d 762 (Fla. 2002), of a typical contractual appraisal provision: Appraisal. If you and we fail to agree on the amount of…