One of the more disputed areas of workers’ compensation in PA, and therefore the source of many appellate decisions, is whether an employee is injured in the scope and course of his or her employment. We have addressed scope and course of employment many times on this blog. Recently, another…
We have discussed the Notice of Temporary Compensation Payable (NTCP or TNCP) on this blog in the past. This is a tool a Pennsylvania workers’ compensation insurance carrier can use if it is still investigating and unsure whether to formally accept liability for a work injury in PA (instead of…
We have written volumes about the Impairment Rating Evaluation (IRE) process. It would now appear all of those words just became moot with the decision rendered by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, which ruled the entire IRE provision to be unconstitutional. Back in September of 2015, we talked about the…
On this blog we often discuss the beginning and ending of a workers’ compensation case in Pennsylvania. This is a natural, and obvious, area of litigation. However, there is also potential for dispute, and thus, litigation, when an injured worker goes back to work. This is especially true where the…
Since the Pennsylvania Workers’ Compensation Act covers “employees,” but not “independent contractors,” the relationship between these two terms is something we have previously discussed on our blog. A recent case from the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania on this topic featured an added twist of a late answer. In Hawbaker v.…
When one thinks of an “injury,” typically one is imagining a sudden physical incident. Maybe a roofer falls from a ladder. A nurse pulls her back positioning a patient. A machine operator catches a hand in a device. While these are certainly injuries we see in PA workers’ compensation, not…
This seems to be the month for Average Weekly Wage (AWW) cases. If you have not been keeping up with our blog (first, shame on you! 😉 ), AWW is the calculation of an injured worker’s wages, which is used to determine the amount of workers’ compensation benefits the injured…
As we have discussed previously, the vast majority of folks working in Pennsylvania are covered by the Pennsylvania Workers’ Compensation Act. However, the calculation of wages, for the purposes of awarding workers’ comp benefits, can vary by the status of an employee. For example, a “seasonal” employee is treated differently…
With the recent decision by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania to accept appeal in the Sladek case, and the multitude of cases in Commonwealth Court, litigation regarding the presumption of cancer in firefighters is a hot topic. One area which was not addressed, until the recent Commonwealth Court decision in…
A topic we frequently address, since it often becomes the subject of appellate decisions, is whether a worker is injured while in the scope and course of his or her job. Generally (outside the commuting issue), either the employee took a small, momentary departure from the job, or completely left…