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A series of articles emphasizing practical
knowledge you can't find in practice guides
and interviews with experts who share
their techniques for effective and efficient
case management
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Articles emphasizing practical knowledge you
can't find in practice guides
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Profiles of people who changed workers’
compensation law.
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• Warren Schneider
•
Marjory Harris
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Subpoenaed records arrive in
great numbers in workers’ compensation cases. Are they sitting
in stacks in your office? Do you ever get around to
reading them all? Do you hope that the medical-
legal evaluator will read them and summarize
them, saving you the chore? Do you rely on a
review service or a
professional reviewer?
Nowadays, with apportionment issues looming
large, doctors' depositions being commonplace,
and the need to decide early on in the case how
many resources to allocate, it is more important
than ever to review the records as soon as you
get them. If you are not able to delegate this task
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to a professional reviewer, the following
tips will make your job easier.
Some copy services send you a CD with the records (
e.g., Med-Legal). I save the
file to my client’s folder, so I don't have to look all over
for the records or the CD later.
I make my comments and annotations on the saved PDF file. If the records
come
from a copy service that does not supply a CD, I take the records
out of the ACCO™
clip and scan them, using an
OCR program. This saves a lot of time later, as I can
quickly search for words. I save the scanned copy to my client’s
folder before
making my comments and annotations.
It is a good idea to keep a clean,
unmarked copy of the records before adding comments, highlighting,
and the like. You may need to send the clean copy to your opponent,
or a medical-legal evaluator, or extract sections to submit as evidence.
If you are used to working in the
files themselves, you probably have yellow or other
colored labels or Post-its® sticking out like porcupine quills.
When reviewing
records in digital mode, you can add bookmarks. You may also want
to add yellow
highlighting so that you can quickly find the most important information
on the page.
Inserting notes is a useful method of review, since you can later
print out your
comments with the file or by themselves. The notes may be removed
when no
longer necessary.
(Click to Enlarge)
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