Firm News

I came across this article about the continuing problems and concerns about Opt Out worker's compensation plans: Opt Out: A Painful Reassessment. One major take-away: these opt out plans have grown in the absence of informed public debate. The more one can shine a...

What is a legal presumption? Can a legal presumption be rebutted by sufficient contrary evidence? Wisconsin workers' compensation law contains many presumptions. For example, for firefighters, it is presumed that if a firefighter has cancer, the cancer is...

A recent study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, the official publication of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, in September 2016 reported that obese and overweight workers are more likely to result in higher...

If you are a younger worker, you are more likely to get hurt on the job. That is the conclusion in a recent interesting article in Occupational Health & Safety: Protecting our Future: Young Worker Safety on the Job. The article offers theories on why younger...

State workers' compensation laws are facing increased scrutiny from the federal government. As reported by NPR, the U.S. Labor Department is exploring the idea of further oversight of state-run workers' compensation systems. The full Labor Department report can be...

"He'll never go back to school." "He'll never complete school." As a representative of injured workers, I hear those refrains on repeat from insurance carriers. And, guess what? It's just not true. Vocational retraining claims straddle the line between being a...

Injured workers now have greater access to vocational retraining benefits. The new law changes, while providing a number of employer-friendlyprovisions, also contained pro-worker enactments-especially for those injured workers who need to go back to school. A major...

I read most things through the narrow prism of a lawyer representing injured workers and a Law Professor teaching Workers' Compensation. I read with fascination Dr. Sunita Sah's (M.D., MBA, Ph.D., Cornell University Professor)recent article in the New York Times...

The Oklahoma Supreme Court declared the "opt out" law unconstitutional. This victory for injured workers will echo throughout the country and serves as a cautionary tale for any state considering similar discriminatory laws. Read about the decision in detail here.

Workers' Compensation is a compromise. As originally crafted in 1911 and as interpreted, Wisconsin Workers' Compensation is a compromise in which both employers and employees surrender certain advantages in order to gain others that are deemed more important....