Ohio: Provision Requiring Employer’s Consent to Dismissal Without Prejudice of Comp Claim is Unconstitutional

A 2006 amendment to Ohio Rev. Code Ann. § 4123.512(D) that restricted the rights of an injured employee to voluntarily dismiss his complaint without obtaining the consent of the employer and to utilize Ohio Rev. Code Ann. § 2305.19 to re-file his case is unconstitutional, held a state appellate court. The court noted that in a civil action, a plaintiff could unilaterally dismiss his or her complaint and re-file it without prejudice pursuant to Rule 41(A)(1)(a) of the Ohio Rules of Civil Procedure. As a “plaintiff,” a claimant under § 4123.512 should be afforded all the rights provided to him or her by the Rules of Civil Procedure. There was no rational relationship between stripping injured workers of their rights provided under the rules and the fundamental purposes of workers’ compensation.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance. Bracketed citations link to lexis.com.

See Ferguson v. State of Ohio, 2015-Ohio–4499, 2015 Ohio App. LEXIS 4435 (Oct. 29, 2015) [2015-Ohio–4499, 2015 Ohio App. LEXIS 4435 (Oct. 29, 2015)]

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 124.01 [124.01]

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law.

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