03 Oct 2021

Georgia: Second Fall at Home Broke Chain of Causation Related to Earlier Injury

Emphasizing that it was for Georgia’s State Board of Workers’ Compensation to resolve a conflict in the evidence and not for the superior court, which initially reviewed the Board’s decision, a state appellate court reversed and remanded a case in which the Board had found that a worker’s slip and fall at his home was not causally connected to an earlier work-related injury because the worker had already recovered before sustaining the second injury. The appellate court noted that a physician had opined that, subsequent to the work-related injury, and before the fall at his residence, the worker had reached MMI. The worker also had been released for light duty. The fall at home was a subsequent, intervening cause of the worker’s current condition. It was error for the superior court to substitute its judgment for that of the Board.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the co-Editor-in-Chief and Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis

See Express Empl. Professionals v. Barker, 2021 Ga. App. LEXIS 426 (Aug. 26, 2021)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 10.01.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see