I had the good fortune to attend the Steve Jimenez Memorial Special Recognition Awards on September 11, 2009. Congratulations to:
You may not want to hear this, but Ogilvie II is probably worse for Defendants than Ogilvie I. ((Photo courtesy of Lawrence Whittmore)) Check out page 32:
if within five years of the date of injury it later becomes clear that the employee’s individualized proportional earnings loss is significantly higher or lower than anticipated, a party may seek to reopen the issue of permanent disability by challenging the originally used DFEC adjustment factor.
I think we can expect to see a petition to reopen on any case that settled prior to 2/3/2009. ((February 3, 2009 is the day Ogilvie I came out.))
A company once told me someone had offered to build permanent disability calculators for their website in three months for $7,500. One said six months and $20,000. Recently, another suggested it would take them a year and $40,000. My response is usually some variation on “You’ve got to take that deal. You’re wasting your time talking to me.”
It’s no big secret that building a great product takes a lot of work. The important thing to remember is that just because something is easy-to-use, that doesn’t mean its easy-to-make. ((Visit the link for a PDF of a cut-and-fold iPhone. Thanks Gizmodo!))
Let’s take the iPhone for example. Everyone will concede its an easy phone to use. However, it was released more than two years ago on 6/29/2007. ((Wikipedia link.)) In that time the other players – BlackBerry, LG, Nokia, and Palm have all been trying to catch up. If this easy-to-use phone were easy-to-build everyone would have their own version.
Look, there’s no special magic to building a website like this. Really, anyone can do it. All you have to do is learn the calculations inside-and-out, deconstruct the math involved in the various calculations, learn some client and server side programming languages, learn a content management system, make it all work together, keep current on changes in the law, start all over again each time the law changes, and earn the respect of the workers’ compensation community. Once done, you’ll have your very own workers’ compensation calculator website!
To return to the lesson of the iPhone, building a touch screen phone that can play music and surf the web is totally doable. Doing it right is another matter entirely.
As I mentioned previously, each of these cases is about 50 pages long, so there is clearly no substitute for reading them for yourself. However, here’s Ogilvie II and Almaraz/Guzman II in five sentences: ((Photo courtesy of Scallop Holden))
What do these cases mean for the practitioner?
The Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board is back with their en banc decisions on Ogilvie and Almaraz/Guzman after reconsideration. ((Photo courtesy of arturodonate)) Download the Ogilvie/Almaraz/Guzman decisions all in one place:
Each of these four is about 50 pages. Read them carefully, there will be a test later.
