Greetings,

• Don’t forget to scour everything you received on Wednesday and over the break for 1-time change requests.  Watch out for anything referencing “an alternative” doctor or anything citing 440.13(2)(f).   You must respond by 4:59 pm today, Monday, 11/30/20.
• DOAH has released its annual report, the usual treasure trove of statistics about the FL WC system.  However, this year’s analysis is somewhat hampered by the pandemic, DOAH’s fiscal year runs 7/1/19-6/30/20.  So this report captures 9 “normal months” and 3 ‘pandemic months”.   Overall there are some interesting trends:
• 6% decrease in the number of new litigated WC claims.
• 4% decrease in the amount of litigation within the open claims (PFB’s)

-However, in the 9 months pre-pandemic, the amount of litigation was up 4.3%.  April was down 23%, May was down 29%, and June was slightly up 1%.  So, absent the pandemic, we were heading for a fairly sizable increase in the amount of litigation within each case.

Here is the link to the report.  DO NOT PRINT unless you hate trees, its 309 pages.

https://www.jcc.state.fl.us/JCC/publications/reports/2020AnnualReport/OJCC_AnnualReport2019-20.pdf

And below is my tip from September with some COVID specific statistics for FL WC.

Morgan’s Tip of the Week – FL COVID WC Stats

Sincerely,
Morgan Indek | Managing Partner