Florida: Employer Who Denies Claim Not Always Estopped From Later Defending Tort Action on Exclusivity Grounds

Distinguishing several earlier Florida decisions, in which an employer had been barred from asserting immunity from tort liability on exclusive remedy grounds after it had denied the employee’s workers’ compensation claim on grounds that the injury did not arise out of and in the course of the employment, a Florida appellate court held that the employer (and a co-employee of the plaintiff) were not estopped from utilizing the exclusive remedy defense where the denial of the underlying claim had been based on the contention that there had been no work-related injury at all. Parsing its words carefully, the court said it was not inconsistent for the employer (and co-employee) to claim in the first instance that no accident had occurred, but later to claim in the tort suit that any injury alleged was in the course and scope of the employment.

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 McNair v. Dorsey, 2020 Fla. App. LEXIS 589 (1st DCA Jan. 22, 2020)

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

Sign up for the free LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation enewsletter at www.lexisnexis.com/wcnews.