NWCDN Members regularly post articles and summary judgements in workers’ compensations law in your state.
Select a state from the dropdown menu below to scroll through the state specific archives for updates and opinions on various workers’ compensation laws in your state.
Contact information for NWCDN members is also located on the state specific links in the event you have additional questions or your company is seeking a workers’ compensation lawyer in your state.
Well-placed sources inform us that the powers that be within the Division have begun focusing on the number of dispute proceedings held each month, supposedly as a means of gauging the effectiveness and productivity of the Hearings section. The higher the number of proceedings held, the reasoning goes, the greater the number of disputes that have been resolved.
However, as usual, a strict quantitative analysis (i.e., pure statistics and number-crunching) tells only part of the story and provides skewed results. In accumulating their data, the DWC makes no differentiation between Contested Case Hearings that result in a Decision & Order and those that are merely convened and continued at the outset. In other words, a hearing that continues at the scheduled start time is considered a “proceeding held,” while a hearing for which a motion to continue is granted before the proceeding will not count toward the tally.
There are two obvious results of this practice. First, the DWC can artificially inflate its total number of proceedings held per month by urging judges to postpone ruling on continuance requests until the day of the hearing. Second, the costs associated with preparing for and traveling to a Contested Case Hearing, only to find that is has been continued at the last minute, are passed along to system participants.