by Alyssa A. Sloan

The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals recently affirmed a lower tribunal's decision that an employee didn't sustain an injury in the course of her employment when she injured her wrist and shoulder while helping a coworker lift a box as a personal errand. Even though the supreme court did not make new law with this decision, the justices did draw a distinction between injuries sustained "in the course of employment" and injuries "resulting from employment."

With respect to the requirement that an injury result from employment, the court reiterated its findings in a past case that a causal connection between the injury and the employment must be established.

What happened

In the case before the court, the claimant injured her right wrist and shoulder while she was helping a contract employee lift a box of maternity clothes that had been left in her office. The contract employee had apparently loaned the clothes to yet another employee, who left the box in the claimant's office when she returned the clothes.

The contract employee, who didn't work in the office with the claimant, asked the claimant for help in lifting and transporting the box to her vehicle. When she lifted the box, the claimant lost her balance and fell, injuring herself.
The claims administrator denied the claim because the injury wasn't sustained "in the course of and resulting from" the claimant's employment. The Workers' Compensation Office of Judges affirmed that decision and found that the employer derived no special benefit from the removal of the box from the premises.

Moving the box was a voluntary act by the claimant to assist the coworker with a personal errand. The board of review affirmed the office of judges' decision, and the claimant appealed to the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.

Court's decision

In her appeal, the claimant argued that although her primary duties as a secretary for the employer were clerical in nature, her formal designation as "support staff" effectively required her to assist coworkers with any task in which they requested assistance. She further argued that the employer received a tangible benefit through its employees working cooperatively and collegially with one another, which entailed accommodating a reasonable request for assistance.

The employer countered that it was undisputed that the claimant's job title and duties in no way encompassed assisting employees with lifting items, much less anything of a wholly personal, non-work-related nature, and her injury therefore wasn't sustained in the course of and resulting from her employment. The employer further argued that it was simply illogical for the claimant to suggest that she perceived no limitations on her purported obligation to assist coworkers as part of her job duties.

The supreme court reviewed statutory and case law that sets out the elements necessary to establish compensability in a workers' compensation claim. The court has previously recognized that to be compensable, a claim must satisfy three elements: (1) It must be a personal injury (2) received in the course of employment and (3) resulting from that employment. The court further noted that the two phrases "in the course of" and "resulting from" are not synonymous, and both elements must be satisfied to make a claim compensable.

In reviewing the facts of the case before it, the supreme court found that the "course of employment" prong was easily satisfied because the claimant was on the employer's premises during her regular work hours and ostensibly tending to her duties at the time the request for assistance in lifting the box was made. The crux of the decision therefore involved whether her injury was causally related to and "resulting from" her employment.

After reviewing several out-of-jurisdiction cases and treatises on the general definition of both phrases, the court recognized that the issue in this case hinged on whether the activity the claimant was engaged in was for the primary purpose of a coworkers' personal benefit.

To that end, the court relied on the leading treatise on workers' comp, which states that injuries occurring while an employee is rendering aid to a coworker, if the aid takes the form of merely helping with some matter entirely personal to the coworker, are outside the course of employment, unless the deviation from work is insubstantial.

In reviewing cases from other jurisdictions, the court found that the determination of whether an injury sustained while the employee was assisting a coworker with a purely personal matter is causally related to employment is heavily fact-dependent and not easily resolved by the application of any particular law.

In light of the intensely factual nature of these types of cases, the supreme court found that it was required to give deference to the administrative fact-finder. Without specific statutory guidance in this matter, the court couldn't find that the board of review's determination was a clearly erroneous conclusion of law. As a result, it upheld the finding that the claimant did not suffer an injury resulting from her employment.

Bottom line

Even though the supreme court didn't articulate any new legal standard in this case, it did show a willingness to defer to the Workers' Compensation Board of Review and the Office of Judges in very factually specific decisions involving a determination about whether a claimant's injury during the course of employment actually "resulted from" the employment.

Alyssa A. Sloan (alyssa.sloan@steptoe-johnson.com) is Of Counsel with Steptoe & Johnson PLLC.