Workers' Compensation: Iowa Joins Other States Not Adopting the AMA Guides 6th Edition

Workers' Compensation: Iowa Joins Other States Not Adopting the AMA Guides 6th Edition

Know Your ALJ

Social Security Administrative Law Judges are a unique breed. This website will allow you to check, by name of Judge, his or her productivity. Fascinating. Have Fun.

Denied Your Private Disability Insurance Claim? Read This!

Oftentimes Employees are protected by a Long Term Disability Policy by their employer. A premium payment is taken out of their paycheck for this protection which is designed to pay the worker a weekly benefit should you be unable to work on account of an injury or illness after a certain period of time---typically 180 days. This LTD insurance, as it is called, is a separate and distinct benefit from worker's compensation coverage which is a statutory benefit.

One company offering such a plan is the Unum Insurance Company, also known as Unum Provident. Allegations have been made that Unum has been unilaterally and improperly denying LTD claims for employees thatr should be entitled to receive this this coverage.

If you have been injured or taken ill on the job and have a LTD policy offered by Unum or Unum Provident, and your claim has been denied, check out this website. When you talk to these folks, tell them I referred you.

In the meantime, if you have questions relating to Connecticut worker's compensation or personal injury claim, contact our office.

Rumour Fueled Assualt on Homosexual Co-Worker provides Lurid fact pattern but predictable result

In a recently released decision, the CRB was called upon to determine whether or not the trial Commissioner had erred when he found that an assault on a homosexual restaurant worker by a fellow employee after- hours was not compensable within the language of the Connecticut Worker's Coimpensation Act. According to the reported facts in Hernandez v. Pizzaria 101 and Family, The claimant was attacked in a parking lot after work one evening by a fellow employee who had evidently heard a rumour that the Claimant was having a homosexual relationship with the attacker. The rumour reportedly got back to the attacker's hometown in Mexico, where the attacker's girlfriend got wind of it and was not surprisingly distressed.

Despite the vivid and somewhat intriguing fact pattern, the case really just stands for the axiomatic proposition in Connecticut worker's compensation law that assaults by co-worker's (no matter how intriguing the circumstances) and any other manner of workplace brawl or tomfoolery are not compensable under our Act.

If you are injured on the job in connecticut, feel free to call our offices for a free, no obligation assessment of your case.

Does He or Doesn't He?

For many of us in the field of Connecticut worker's compensation law, a burning question is often whether or not an employer is insured for worker's compensation coverage. Now, thanks to the hard work of our Commission, and the miracles of technology, we need wonder no more.

On December 22nd, Connecticut rolled out it's online verification system. Now, it is a simple matter of entering your employer's name and the date you were injured to determine whether or not coverage was in effect to protect you.

If you have any questions about this, feel free to contact our offices.

FHA ANNOUNCES HOPE FOR HOMEOWNER'S

The United States Department of Housing has announced its' new Hope For Homeowner's Program which which may help people in distress from home mortgages that are currently overwhelming them. Please contact me personally if you have concerns. I may be able to put you in touch with some Connecticut lenders partipating in this program and perhaps find a way to save your home. Now wouldnt that be a nice holiday gift!

Details on the program can be found here.

Being a Lawyer is "A punishing Way To Make A Living"

Norm's article struck me on so many levels. I paste it below verbatim for your reading.

Unsettling Phone Call From Panicky Client

By NORM PATTIS

I admire those lawyers who give out telephone numbers at which they can be reached both day and night. Me, I am unavailable after 7 p.m. There are no exceptions. This is a punishing way to make a living. Come sundown, I want to curl up with a good book, and then get some sleep.

So I was stunned the other night when my cell phone rang at the ungodly hour of 9 p.m. I worried that one of our three children was in trouble. I knew my wife wasn't calling; she lay beside me.

“Who could that be?" I asked, fumbling for the phone. Just a few weeks earlier, I had changed my cell phone number. Too many people had it. And too many were calling at all hours asking questions that demanded, in their view, immediate answers.

I knew this caller. She is a recent immigrant to the United States, just naturalized as a citizen. She and her husband are good people. They work hard, and hope sometime soon to start a family of their own.

She was frantic. The police had been to their home, a note from her husband said. He went to the station to talk to them. When she called the police station, officers said her husband was busy and could not talk. This had trouble written all over it.

I placed a call to the detective bureau.

“Yeah, he's here,” a surly sounding voice grumbled.

“I am his lawyer, and I want to talk to him.”

“He's busy right now. I'll pass that along,” the voice said.

“No,” I told him, “you'll do more than that. You will stop interviewing him now.” My wife put down the thriller she was reading, and was looking at me. This was real life. No need to turn a page to watch this.

I'm not sure what the cop said next, but I recall some bluster of mine that went like this: “It's now 9:10. The interview is over. If I find out it continued, I'll be wearing your badge next Halloween. Got it?”

A half hour later I still had not heard from the husband. I called the station back. A sergeant got on the phone. He apologized for Officer Charm, and I reciprocated: We both copped attitudes, I said.

The husband was to be charged with sexual assault on a minor. A warrant was about to be served. An interview had stopped an hour or so before I called. I wondered what pretext they used to hold the husband as the warrant was sought.

Not long afterward, he was arrested. His bond set at $150,000.

His wife went to pieces on the phone. At 10 p.m. I hear shrieks and sobbing. “What am I going to do? Help me, please help me.” I try to explain what a bond is, but I am not getting through. And then words that strike me like ice water. “But they are torturing him, I know it. You have to get him out of there.”

I am cynical about law enforcement. It is a product of 15 years litigating police misconduct cases. But the days of the rubber hose are long since past. I am not at all worried about this man's will being broken by violence.

But she is from South America. I try to imagine what assumptions she brings to a late-night detention at the police station. She wants to go to the station herself, to make her presence known, to be a witness against the state should they do violence to her man. I marvel at this response. Somehow, were my wife told in the dead of night I had been arrested for sexually assaulting a minor, I suspect I might need a jailer's bars for protection.

I had trouble getting to sleep. I know all the challenges this young family now faces. And I cannot shake the sound of desperate sobbing. When sleep comes, I am grateful for the measure of peace my wife and I share. It is fragile.

Norm Pattis is a criminal defense lawyer and civil rights attorney in Bethany.