Today's post was shared by WorkCompCentral and comes from daviddepaolo.blogspot.com
| We get lost in the world of workers' compensation so deeply, it seems, that we sometimes forget what law really governs our actions. A recent unpublished (which means that the case is not citable in legal proceedings as authority) opinion by the California Fourth District Court of Appeal reminds us that there are times when the Labor Code, the main governing body of statutes in California workers' compensation, takes a back seat. One of those times is when it comes to evidence. Shirley Lappi sustained a workplace injury in 2003 while working as an administrative assistant for the University of California at Irvine. Lappi filed a claim for benefits and demanded that her employer and the insurer produce certain documents related to her claim. The defendants produced most of the documents, along with a privilege log identifying 205 documents that they asserted were not subject to discovery because of the attorney-client privilege and work-product doctrine. After reviewing the log, Lappi's attorney objected to the defendants' failure to disclose 47 of the listed documents because they were not communications between the defendants and defendants' attorneys. A workers' compensation administrative law judge ordered the defendants to provide Lappi with copies of some of the documents. In her order and opinion, the judge stated that she had determined that the documents, which consisted of communications between claims personnel, were not privileged unless they specifically discussed a... |
