WCDefenseCA

Happy Wednesday dear readers!

Your humble blogger has the kindest, smartest, most diligent readership of any blogger out there.  I was corrected by a reader who told me the proper greeting, when addressing a group of people rather than an individual, was not “howdy y’all” but “howdy all y’all.”  No doubt, this is akin to Usted/Ustedes in Spanish, viy/viy in Russian, Atah/Atem in Hebrew, and likely many more languages that I don’t have the pleasure of butchering with my attempts to speak.

Nevertheless, though corrected and humbled, your humble blogger is still here to bring you an updated regarding medical-legal evaluations.  Proposed changes to Rule 36.7 would make permanent electronic service of medical-legal reports (rather than allowing for this as emergency regulations). 

The regulation, as proposed, would allow any of the parties involved to agree to receive a QME report via electronic service by providing an e-mail address.  It further refines the regulation to place the burden of providing an updated e-mail address to the QME or AME on the party. 

The regulation continues to require a proof of service and maintaining of records, just as before.

Your humble blogger, for one, is in favor of this approach.  How many times have we been plagued by opposing counsel, trying to conceal lack of preparation and diligence by claiming that he or she never received a particular QME report.  Now we will have concise proof (not the presumption of delivery that comes with a proof of service) that the report was timely served and delivered.

If you are at all like your humble blogger, your own e-mail inbox is overflowing (about two weeks ago I managed to get down to 17 e-mails before looking away for a moment to have it fill right back up).  Sisyphus would be proud.  So perhaps law firms and insurers/employers should start designating a specific e-mail for receiving med-legal reports and make sure those e-mail addresses are diligently monitored and routed to the right desk?

Further, now that we will be able to conclusively show when a report was transmitted to the parties, the WCAB can be a bit more strict with requiring diligence to get these files moved along to resolution?

One can only hope, dear readers – one can only hope!

Straight on till Friday!