Alabama: Post-Injury Actions May Lead to Employer Liability in Tort

Where an employee alleged post-injury tortious conduct on the part of a co-employee in the form of, inter alia, failure to notify an on-site emergency response team of the employee’s injury and further failure to call an ambulance in a timely fashion, the employee stated a cause of action that potentially outside the course and scope of the employment. It was appropriate, therefore, for the trial court to refuse to grant the employer’s motion to dismiss on exclusive remedy grounds. Citing Lowman v. Piedmont Exec. Shirt Mfg. Co., 547 So. 2d 90, (Ala. 1989), the state Supreme Court agreed that an issue of fact existed as to whether the post-injury actions by the co-employee were “too tenuous” to bring the activities under the coverage of the state’s Workers’ Compensation Act and, therefore, trigger the exclusive remedy defense.

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

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See McCoy v. International Paper Co., 2019 Ala. LEXIS 136 (Dec. 6, 2019)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 100.04.

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see

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