Work-related injuries in Illinois are compensable to employees under two conditions:

• The injury occurred in the scope of employment;
• The injury arose out of the course of employment.

Injuries that happen on one’s work commute, however, are generally not deemed compensable, because courts have generally ruled that they do not satisfy the second prong. Specifically, one’s employer isn’t deriving a benefit from the commute, so the commute isn’t considered within the scope of employment because it’s not part of the ordinary course of one’s work.

But as our workers’ compensation attorneys can explain, this principle-known as the “coming-and-going rule”-is not absolute. There are numerous exceptions to the coming-and-going rule, so one should not assume an injury isn’t covered by workers’ compensation benefits just because it happened on the way to or the way home from work.

Illinois workers’ compensation lawyers know that on-the-job safety can be largely dependent on company culture. A firm that prioritizes worker safety is going to have fewer workplace injuries, and that holds true even for some of the most dangerous industries. That’s because most worker injuries are preventable, if employers take the time to properly train, equip and supervise workers.

But a new study finds that if companies are more focused on their bottom line and meeting earning quotas, workplace safety falls by the wayside, resulting in more reported injuries and workers’ compensation claims. Increasingly, companies throughout the U.S. are under intense pressure to meet stringent earnings expectations and quotas.

The study was published recently in the Journal of Accounting and Economics. It finds a causal correlation between high earning pressure and workplace injuries. The authors analyzed injury data from 870 companies, as provided to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OHSA) between 2002 and 2011. In all, there were 35,400 reports analyzed. What they found was that when companies met or just barely exceeded the financial expectations of their sector, their injury rate was 1 in 23. Meanwhile, companies that missed that substantially missed that mark – either falling short or exceeding it comfortably –  had an injury rate of 1 in 27.

A number of legislative efforts over the last year have focused on making it simply for first responders grappling with PTSD to obtain workers’ compensation benefits.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is probably best recognized as a condition afflicting combat soldiers. In those instances, the development of the condition typically arises from a singular incident or a brief exposure to trauma. First responders, meanwhile, typically incur what’s called cumulative PTSD, meaning it builds up over the course of many years. It’s a disorder characterized by failure to recover after experiencing or witnessing a terrifying event. But for police officers, firefighters, emergency medical technicians and paramedics, PTSD can develop over decades of work-related stress.

Hip implants are an unfortunate necessity for many Americans. They provide the mobility that may have been lost due to age, illness, or injury and restore quality of life that had previously been compromised. However, they don’t always live up to standards; implants and their accompanying mechanisms can fail, become misaligned, and succumb to numerous other malfunctions.

In the case of Stryker Corporation’s LFIT Anatomic CoCr V40 Femoral Head commonly referred to as the “V40 Head”, the device eventually fell victim to corrosion; causing the metal to break down and toxins to leak into the surrounding metal and bone tissue, leading to a product recall.

If you get hurt on-the-job and you are an independent contractor, you need to determine if you are covered by workers’ compensation insurance. A company that hires an independent contractor generally does not have to provide workers’ compensation coverage, but there are many situations in which a person who was hired as an independent contractor isn’t actually an independent contractor and thus should be covered. Further, if you are an independent contractor, you may have purchased your own workers’ comp insurance, in which case you would be covered for your work injury.

If you did not purchase workers’ comp coverage and you are genuinely an independent contractor in the eyes of the law, workers’ comp benefits likely will not be available to you. You can try to pursue a lawsuit if someone was to blame for the injury that you endured, but will need to demonstrate that the defendant who you are pursuing a case against failed to fulfill some legal obligation in a way that caused you harm. This is more difficult to do than to make a workers’ comp claim where you only must show you got hurt while at work.

With the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) reporting 250 daily injuries during the holiday season, accident prevention is paramount for families. This step-by-step guide can help you to maximize the chances you and your family will be able to get through the holidays safely.

In an effort to make America’s roads safer and provide accurate information after an accident, commercial truck drivers will soon be required to install electronic logging devices which keep track of their speed, hours of service and other critical information.

“This is a win for all motorists on our nation’s roadways,” Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) Administrator T. F. Scott Darling III said in a FMCSA statement announcing the new regulations.  “Employing technology to ensure that commercial drivers comply with federal hours-of-service rules will prevent crashes and save lives.”

Under the new rules, trucking companies have until December 2017 to install ELDs in every new commercial truck, according to a recent news article published in The Virginian Pilot. Many existing trucks already use older automatic on-board recording devices (AOBRD), according to the FMCSA. These older devices are “grandfathered” for a limited time, but carriers will be required to replace them with ELDs compliant with the new regulations by December 2019.