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An appellate court in Georgia has issued a decision setting forth the standard a trial court should use when reviewing a decision of the state's workers' compensation board relating to attorney's fees. The ruling is likely to make it more difficult to challenge board decisions awarding or denying attorney's fees in these cases.
|The case
Matthew Kerkela, a restaurant manager, submitted a claim for workers' compensation benefits, asserting that he had been injured on the job. One week before a scheduled hearing before an administrative law judge (ALJ), Amguard Insurance Company, Kerkela's employer's workers' compensation insurance carrier, accepted Kerkela's claim as compensable.
Amguard authorized Kerkela's continued medical treatment and payment of past medical bills; paid Kerkela a lump sum of past-due temporary total disability (TTD) income benefits from the date he had stopped working to the date his claim had been accepted; paid a 15% late-payment penalty of the lump sum; and agreed to pay attorney's fees equal to 25% of the income benefits already paid.
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Steven A. Meyerowitz
Steven A. Meyerowitz, a Harvard Law School graduate, is the founder and president of Meyerowitz Communications Inc., a law firm marketing communications consulting company. He may be contacted at [email protected].
