As promised! A new calculator!
Well, check out my new social security number online search tool, powered by Verify.com. It has some pretty cool features. You can Verify!®:
I’m working on several more workers compensation calculators. I’m really excited about one of them in particular. 1
I’ve been working to develop calculators and search engines that are easier to use, easier to understand, and make them available to everyone for less than my competitors. One benefit to doing it all myself is that I can innovate faster than anyone else. For instance, my wildly popular Ogilvie calculator was available to beta testers just days after the Ogilvie case came out.
But, this new calculator is something entirely new. Tantalized? Titilated? Tremulous?
Stay tuned!
A defense attorney friend of mine called me up yesterday to say (I’m paraphrasing here), “You jackass. Thanks to your Ogilvie proof every Applicant’s attorney I know is calling me up, gloating, and asking for 18 points on top of the whole person impairment on every case! Why the hell did you do that???”1 My first thought was of my favorite quote from Swingers.2 What I actually said was something along the lines of:
For the moment, let’s set aside the issue of whether California’s injured workers have gotten a raw deal since SB899. Suppose there’s an injured worker with a finger injury, stays on temporary disability for two years, and is immediately made permanent and stationary. If instead they get a 0% WPI, they get nothing. If they gets a 1% WPI, Ogilvie tells us this person gets a DFEC adjusted WPI of 19%.
Nearly every litigated case involves an extended period of temporary disability and a whole person impairment less than 45.4 Ogilvie effectively removes the first 18% permanent partial disability levels.
I really don’t think the WCAB intended this consequence. Don’t get upset with me – as long as Ogilvie is the law I might as well make Ogilvie calculations easy for you, right?5
Yesterday from about noon to 4pm the server which hosts this website (and many others) was down. This unfortunately lead to an interruption for which I apologize.1 During this time I was unable to send/receive emails and the website was unavailable.
The hosting company I use is very good. When there’s been downtime it normally occurs during non-peak hours and is very short in duration. This was an anomaly.
Anyhow, everything is back on line and open for business.
What’s that? You haven’t memorized ALL of the FEC ranks to go with each of the 2005 Permanent Disability Rating Schedule body parts? 1
Why didn’t you say so? (Actually, someone did ask for an easy way to look up the FEC ranks back on April 1).
I’ve been working on an easy way to allow a user to look up and quickly insert the FEC rank for the affected body part. I finally got around to building it a few days ago and launched it this morning. Please give it a shot and let me know what you think.
Here’s all you need to do to perform your very own Ogilvie calculation:
If you can think of a way for me to make this calculator even easier, please let me know. 2
Unfortunately, one of the coolest features of my calculators is that some of them will give you the answer you’re looking for before you’ve even finished typing the search term. This works with the:
While these are all very cool while you’re sitting at your computer, I found out (much to my dismay) that this system didn’t work at all when using these online calculators from my cell phone! 1 Well, I’ve updated the calculators to make them more compatible with more phones.2
Save yourself from your own workers’ compensation claim and just leave that heavy rating manual at home.
I was at the San Jose WCAB on Friday. Since recently discovering that I could run this website’s permanent disability rating calculators from my phone’s web browser, this was the first time I left my rating manual, money chart, and date wheel in the car.1
It was great. That morning I used my phone to:
The benefit for me is not so much that I don’t have to carry the rating manuals, dollar value charts, and date wheels. Unlike these tools, my phone is not something I’m going to misplace or loan and never see again.
The best part is that if I want to refer back to the calculation I just performed, I can just e-mail it to myself!
I recently discovered that installing the Opera Mini web browser on my “smartphone” has allowed me to run this website’s workers’ compensation calculators from my phone.1
Since launching this website I’ve given a lot of thought to support for cell phones. There just are not many phones that can run these calculators.2 The glaring and notable exception is the iPhone.
Amusingly, one of this website’s users has asked for an “iPhone app” version of this site. Seriously, you’ve got one of the few phones that can use this site and that’s not good enough for you? (Thanks Chris!)
This is huge. It means:
To this day, most of the e-mails I receive are from people asking me some variation of “No, really, how much does it cost to use these calculators? When am I going to be charged? What’s the catch?”
I intend to keep all the calculators free for anyone who cares to use them. I have built this website because I really do enjoy the hell out of blogging about tech stuff and workers’ comp law, dissecting complex workers’ compensation math formulas, and building something useful to myself and other professionals. This is quite literally how I spend my free time. I’m just that nerdy.
I was recently sent feedback about the Ogilvie DFEC rebuttal calculator on this website. 1 Here’s how I’ve incorporated that feedback:
There are two other issues I’m thinking about:
How would you change these calculators? What else would you like to see? What do you hate about them? Shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment!
