About
About the Author
My name is Jay Shergill and I am a workers’ compensation defense attorney in Northern California. I have been practicing Workers’ Compensation law since 2002. I handle cases throughout Northern and Central California – from Redding to Fresno. I am also on the Executive Committee of the Workers’ Compensation Section of the State Bar of California. I’m a self-professed nerd, having come to terms with my identity some time ago. Sometimes I even refer to myself as a “workers’ compensation nerd.”
In addition to being an attorney, I am also a self-taught web based programmer. This website is built using open source software – PHP, MySQL, and Wordpress. I wrote most of the plugins that control how this website looks and operates – from the nifty rounded corners to banners that appear asking polling questions.
As you may have noticed, I’m a big fan of open source software. I use Thunderbird for e-mail instead of Outlook, OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office, and PHP/MySQL instead of ASP/SQL.
I get my news 80% from NPR, 10% from blogs/RSS feeds, and 10% from The Daily Show.
Oh, and I wear glasses.
About PDRater.com
For those of you who are interested in such things: the earliest versions of this website were written in javascript and PHP. The most recent version is written in javascript, PHP, MySQL, and AJAX with a Wordpress framework.
I launched this website on July 23, 2007 as a foray into programming and as a free service to anyone who wanted to be able to quickly perform the (sometimes) tedious calculations necessary in workers’ compensation. While these calculations are (usually) not terribly complicated, the work involved in calculating benefits over the life of a claim can become unwieldy.