Virginia: Trip and Fall Injury While Attending Mandatory Training Session Was Not Compensable

A professional counselor, who sustained injuries when she tripped and fell over raised tree roots as she walked on the campus of a community college where she was to attend mandatory off-site training, did not sustain an injury arising out of and in the course of her employment, held a Virginia appellate court. Reiterating that Virginia follows what it calls the “actual risk” doctrine, the appellate court observed that while the counselor’s attendance at the scheduled training may have been required by her employer, the employer had controlled neither the location where she parked nor the route she took to get to the building. Her risk of tripping and falling over the roots was essentially the same as any other member of the general public. The injury could not, therefore, be said to have arisen out 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 City of Va. Beach v. Hamel, 2019 Va. App. LEXIS 44 (Feb. 26, 2019)

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

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see