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Video Summary
This source explains that legal liability in a workplace setting operates differently than in standard personal injury lawsuits. While a typical accident case requires proving that someone else was responsible, workers’ compensation is a no-fault system that serves as an exclusive legal remedy. Employees are generally entitled to benefits even if their own carelessness or violation of safety rules contributed to the incident. This framework acts as a compromise, ensuring workers receive support while protecting employers from massive civil damages. Only extreme cases, such as intentional self-harm or ignoring direct supervisor commands, typically disqualify a claim. Ultimately, the discussion emphasizes that negligence is not a barrier to receiving medical and financial assistance after an on-the-job injury.
Transcription of the Video
I’m Clark Speaks, the catastrophic injury lawyer. Welcome to The Verdict. Welcome back to The Verdict. I’m Clark Speaks. I’m here with Brian Grosser. Brian, we receive this call sometimes: ‘I was involved in some kind of an accident at work. It was not my fault. This thing happened.’ And what I consistently want to talk to someone about is, does it matter if it’s your fault or not? So, in this workplace incident, is fault a necessary component? If it was the other person’s fault, is that a necessary component of a workers’ compensation claim?
No, fault is not taken into consideration when it comes to compensation. Let me explain why. If you were at a retail store—let’s just use Target as an example—and you slipped and fell, one of Target’s defenses in those cases would be an ‘open and obvious’ defense, suggesting you were negligent. If you weren’t texting on your phone, you should have seen that substance on the floor. If you were just paying attention as a reasonable person would be paying attention, you would not have slipped and fell.
These are the standards that take place in an ordinary tort case, in a premises liability case outside of the world of workers’ compensation. So, if a normal patron is walking through Target and they call us to say ‘I slipped and fell at Target, can I recover?’, that’s the analysis that you’re going through right now, right? Exactly.
That analysis is thrown out the window when it comes to workers’ comp. For an employee, fault is thrown out because it’s a trade-off. At Target, in that first incident, they may be liable for significant damages depending on the severity of the injury. But on the flip side, the customer may recover nothing if they were contributorily negligent. It’s possible they recover nothing. So it’s a wide range where Target has a vast amount of exposure, and the plaintiff may recover nothing.
Workers’ comp is a compromise between those two. It allows the employee—as I’ve said, the employee is essentially directed into workers’ comp. If you get hurt at work, it is automatically put under workers’ compensation. You cannot sue them in superior court like we were talking about a customer suing a retail business. For an employee, it’s an exclusive remedy. If an employee gets injured at work, they have to go through the workers’ comp system.
There are pluses and minuses to that. One of the pluses is that you don’t have that ‘zero.’ If you were negligent in any way, you can still recover. You still are able to recover under workers’ comp regardless of your negligence. There’s a very finite exception that rarely applies. The general rule is that negligence has no bearing on your case from your own perspective. If you were negligent, you can still recover as long as the incident occurred within the course and scope of employment.
This is a perfect example: there was a case several years ago that went to the court of appeals, I think it even went to the Supreme Court. They were using a front loader at a construction site. At the end of the day, the individual was in a gravel lot and used it to lift materials to the second floor. He was supposed to take the equipment back to the shed at the end of the day. Well, on his way to the shed, he decided it would be a good idea to do donuts in the gravel parking lot with the front loader before taking it to the shed. He wanted to blow off some steam. Of course, what subsequently happened? The machine tipped over and crushed him, causing substantial injuries.
The employer said, ‘This person wasn’t hired to do donuts; he knows he’s not supposed to do that. That’s not in his job description.’ Ultimately, the court of appeals said, ‘We’re not here to observe how negligently he operated the equipment. If he was authorized to operate the equipment and he performed it in a negligent way, he was still authorized to use it.’ Unless there’s an exception—if a supervisor says, ‘Hey Johnny, stop doing donuts,’ and you keep doing them, now we’re not talking about negligence; we’re talking about ignoring what your supervisor is directly telling you to do.
That almost gets into the scope of employment. Exactly. But the general rule is negligence doesn’t apply in workers’ comp. It’s not a barrier just because you were negligent or the employer was negligent.
This is critical because people call and say, ‘I want you to know I was careful and I got hurt at work.’ I frequently want to reach out to them and say, ‘That doesn’t matter.’ I worry about the people who don’t call because they think they are responsible and therefore not entitled to recover. Many cases would be automatically thrown out if violating a safety rule barred recovery. For instance, if you did something on page 79 of the handbook that wasn’t allowed. Many of us don’t read every line of the handbook. If you didn’t follow a specific manner to protect yourself, you violated a safety rule.
But does that mean your comp case isn’t compensable? No, it is still likely compensable even though you weren’t following the safety protocols by the book. The exception is intentional injury. You cannot intentionally injure yourself. If you intentionally try to injure yourself at work, that is a complete bar. There’s a statute that says that. We’re talking about negligence—where you were trying to do your job and you just happened to be negligent.
You might be afraid to file a claim or call an attorney because you feel like you violated a safety rule or the employer said it was your fault. None of that’s true. Fault does not matter as a general rule in workers’ comp cases.
Thank you, Brian. That’s helpful. When we come back, I want to talk about the use of controlled substances and impairment. Thanks for joining us. Don’t forget to subscribe and follow us to stay up to date with our weekly episodes. We’ll see you next time.