Three Georgia Court Decisions Have Some Workers’ Comp Defense Lawyers Worried

After three major Georgia appeals court decisions have gone against employers in the last five years, some insurance defense attorneys are concerned that the state’s workers’ compensation laws have become costly to insurers and businesses, despite years of rate reductions and a pro-business atmosphere in this deep-red part of the country.

“It’s a trend that we’ve noticed at all levels of the courts,” said Samantha Lewis, of Atlanta, a partner in the Parker Poe law firm, who represents school districts in workers’ compensation claims.

The trend began in 2018 and solidified during the COVID-19 pandemic, when courts, lawmakers and the public seemed to express new sympathy for some types of workers, said Lewis and her colleague, Elizabeth Phrampus.

Claimants’ lawyers were surprised by the assertions and argued that judges have simply interpreted the law as it was written.

“I really don’t see a trend leaning toward injured workers,” said claimants’ attorney Todd Maziar, with the Georgia Legal Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in a recent case decided by the appellate court. “These are cases with facts such that the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court simply ruled in favor of the injured worker.”

The courts – with very few dissenting opinions from judges – correctly interpreted the intent of the comp laws and were not legislating from the bench, he added.

While insurance and employer groups have long argued that some states, including California, New York and Illinois, have crafted laws over the decades that could be considered too “worker-friendly” or burdensome to employers, Georgia, with a two-thirds-majority Republican legislature, is not one of those.

The court decisions that Lewis and Phrampus are concerned about began with Cartersville City Schools vs. Johnson in 2018. The Georgia Court of Appeals essentially limited employers’ use of the “idiopathic disease” defense, which had allowed businesses to claim that some injuries were of unknown origin, not necessarily related to the workplace.

In that case, a school teacher had fallen in the classroom and injured her knee, then required surgery. She filed a claim, contending that the injury arose from her employment duties, namely, having to wind her way through tight rows of desks all day. The school district argued that her knee condition was the result of everyday-type activities outside the classroom.

The Court of Appeals overturned previous case law and upheld a lower court, which had struck down the state Workers’ Compensation Board’s denial of the teacher’s claim.

“Evidence showed claimant was actively engaged in the movements and behaviors required of her as a classroom teacher when she fell and was injured as a result of one or more of those movements,” the appeals court judges wrote.

“That case is what started this roller coaster,” Lewis said.

Maziar countered that the idiopathic defense had, over many years, become confused by the courts and had been abused by insurers.

Then came the Frett decision in 2020, Lewis and Phrampus said. In Frett vs. State Farm, the Georgia Supreme Court overturned the Court of Appeals and longstanding case law that had held that injuries that occur during an employee’s scheduled break are not usually compensable.

The high court found that Frett, a claims adjuster for State Farm, slipped on a wet floor at work, causing her injury, while she was on break. The 1935 court decision that had allowed the “scheduled break” defense made no sense and was “untethered from the analytical framework consistently employed by this court in workers’ compensation cases,” Justice Keith Blackwell wrote in the Frett opinion.

In the most recent case cited by the defense lawyers, Lilienthal vs. JLK Inc., the state Court of Appeals in May of this year found that a list of treating physicians was not prominently displayed when it was kept in a locked storage room.

Preschool teacher Linda Lilienthal tripped over a child’s blanket in the classroom, injuring her left shoulder and both knees, the court explained. The school gave her a list of doctors, but went ahead and made an appointment with a nearby clinic.

The workers’ compensation act allows the insurer/employer to pick the six doctors, but the list must be prominently displayed at the workplace.

An administrative law judge decided that the room where the list was displayed was “accessible,” and upheld the denial of Lilienthal’s claim. But the appeals court judges found that the ALJ had misconstrued the law.

“We conclude that the ALJ erred by conflating the concept of accessibility with prominence,” the judges wrote.

Taken together, the three court decisions mark a slippery slope for employers and carriers, the defense lawyers said.

Topics Workers' Compensation Georgia Numbers