Virginia: Employee’s Trip and Fall in Employer’s Staircase is Not Compensable

Again indicating that the state utilized the “actual risk” test, a Virginia appellate court held that injuries sustained by a financial officer as he tripped on concrete steps at his employer’s premises, did not arise out and in the course of the employment. The court noted that in the claimant’s interrogatory answer, he had indicated that he tripped himself. He offered a similar explanation to health care providers after the fall and indicated the same fact patter in a recorded statement to the insurance claims supervisor and in his claim forms. It did not matter that the claimant also contended that a preexisting condition was exacerbated by the employment conditions. All the evidence pointed to the fact the claimant simply fell while ascending non-defective steps.

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.

See Mojares v. RK Chevrolet, 2016 Va. App. LEXIS 318 (Nov. 22, 2016)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 3.03.

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