Texas: Traveling Employee’s Fatal Car Accident Was Not Within Course and Scope of Employment

An employee who traveled from his home base in North Carolina to Dallas, Texas on a business trip did not sustain injuries arising out of and in the course of his employment when he was involved in an automobile accident as he made his way to meet his son, a Dallas resident, for dinner at a restaurant located some 12 miles from his hotel, held a Texas appellate court. The court acknowledged that under the “continuous coverage” rule, a traveling employee generally enjoys broad coverage while out of town on a business trip. It noted, however, that an exception to such coverage had been recognized in cases where an employee deviates from the business purpose of a trip for purely personal reasons. The court added that in order to be compensable, the injury must have had its origin in a risk created by the necessity of sleeping or eating away from home. There is no employer/carrier liability where the injury arose out of voluntary participation in an off-duty recreational, social, or athletic activity that did not constitute part of the employee’s work-related duties, unless the activity was a reasonable expectancy of or was expressly or impliedly required by the employment.

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 Pinkus v. Hartford Cas. Ins. Co., 2015 Tex. App. LEXIS 11515 (Nov. 5, 2015) [2015 Tex. App. LEXIS 11515 (Nov. 5, 2015)]

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 25.03 [25.03]

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