Tennessee: Employer Must Exhaust Administrative Remedies Before Contesting Department’s Authority to Order Second Panel of Physicians

A Tennessee court reversed a trial court and denied an employer’s petition for writ of certiorari within which the employer had asserted that the state’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development had exceeded its authority by ordering the employer to provide a second panel of physicians and a physician outside of Tennessee after the injured employee moved to Minnesota. The court said that by filing the writ petition, rather than appealing the Department’s decision through the Benefit Review Conference process, the employer had failed to exhaust available administrative remedies. The appellate court indicated the trial court, within which the writ petition had been filed, had no subject matter jurisdiction. In its writ petition, the employer contended the Tennessee Act did not give the Department the authority to order an employer to provide a second panel of physicians once the employer had complied with the statute and, moreover, did not require that the employer provide a panel of physicians outside of Tennessee. The trial court found that it had jurisdiction, but that the Department did not exceed its jurisdiction with its order. Both sides appealed. Deciding that the trial court had no jurisdiction, the appellate court said there was no need to address the other issues.

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

See Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. v. Davis, 2015 Tenn. App. LEXIS 380 (May 26, 2015) 

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 94.02

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

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