Ogilvie and Almaraz, en banc

UPDATE 9/3/2009:  Download the new en banc Ogilvie II and Almaraz/Guzman II decisions here!

Need a FREE sample Ogilvie analysis brief complete with citations?

Some crazy stuff has happened in the last two days.  1 Two big en banc decisions were just handed down from the WCAB. Here they are, hot off the presses and ready for downloading:

• Wanda Ogilvie v. City and County of San Francisco, ADJ1177048, SFO 0487779, (en banc) (2/3/2009)
• Mario Almaraz v. Environmental Recovery Services (a.k.a. ENVIROSERVE) and State Compensation Insurance Fund, ADJ1078163, BAK 0145426 (en banc) (2/3/2009) and Joyce Guzman v. Milpitas Unified School District and Keenan & Associates, ADJ3341185,  SJO 0254688 (en banc) (2/3/2009)

Of the two cases, I enjoyed Ogilvie v. City and County of San Francisco much more.  This case describes to what extent the 2005 Permanent Disability Rating Schedule may be rebutted2 and how one might go about doing this.

Pages 22 through 32 are basically nothing but math. 3  These pages detail the information and methodology necessary to rebut the DFEC portion of the 2005 Schedule.

Last night I wrote a prototype calculator which will allow you to determine whether you may or may not be able to rebut the DFEC portion of the 2005 Permanent Disability Rating Schedule.  This calculator would only perform the DFEC rebuttal calculations suggested in the majority opinion, since this is now the law of the land.  My plan is to test it this weekend and launch it Monday.

However, if anyone is interested in helping me test it, I would appreciate the help.  Just drop me a line and I’ll give you the link as soon as its ready.

In the meantime, if you want to crunch the numbers yourself (or follow along with the WCAB in Ogilvie), you will probably find Table A and Table B page 1-7 of the 2005 PDRS to be very helpful.

FYI, there are a lot of “footnotes” in Ogilvie that reference various online documents or websites.  I’ve downloaded a copy or provided a screenshot of each of these pages for your reference:

• FN12a PDRS Initial Statement of Reasons
• FN12b 2003 RAND Study
• FN12c 2004 RAND Study
• FN17 LMID EDD Website – Need More? Just Ask!
• FN18 LMID EDD Website – Homepage
• FN19 LMID EDD Website – Single Quarter Information
• FN20 LMID EDD Website – Occupational Profile
• FN21 LMID EDD Website – Occupational Wages Data Search Tool
• FN23 LMID EDD Website – Customized Reports
• FN27 Newsline No. 66-08

1. Photo courtesy of Kyle Kesselring [↩]
2. Basically just the DFEC portion. [↩]
3. Yay! [↩]