by appliedpsych on Fri Feb 08, 2019 10:57 pm
I had a case a few years ago where a pro per applicant was battling with an attorney for a self-insured employer. The case had already been going on for a while, and the applicant had either fired or had several attorneys back out of her case and was now pro per. She made some pretty wild accusations about past attorneys, which I won't go into, but apparently the WCAB Judge felt that the records of the case, over 14,000 pages, were so important to the case that he ordered QME's by psychologist (me), orthopedic surgeon, internal medicine, dentist and another I cannot recall.
The point is that the Trier of Fact felt that the only way for the applicant to get a fair shake in this complicated case was to send ALL records to ALL QME's. The Trier of Fact made no effort to have his staff or anyone else parse out different records for different QME's. In fact the order was specific that each QME get a digital set of all the records, and that each QME was to closely review all records, and determine how they folded into the issues of the case in each QME specialty.
So, if a WCAB judge, the major authority for the proper settlement of industrial injury claims, takes such an approach, what does this say about the importance of records, whether they are voluminous or not?