Supreme Court Rules for Injured Workers- Emma Murray v. Mariners Health

Injured workers in Florida scored a victory today after a 5 year battle with employers, insurance carriers and the Chamber of Commerce. At issue was whether or not the law as interpreted by the First District Court of Appeal over the past 3+ years really was intended to make the workers' compensation playing field even more uneven than it already was by allowing employers and carriers to pay their defense attorneys as much as they desired to defeat claims by injured workers while restricting the injured workers lawyers to minimal fees no matter how much work was required to win the day. The court was able, in a 5-0 decision, to 'reinterpret' the law as written by the Republican controlled legislature and signed by Jeb Bush, to allow Judges of Compensation Claims to award reasonable fees based upon established criteria that included the amount of benefits obtained along with many other relevant factors, like the number of hours expended. Until today, the district court had reasoned there was only one criteria, the amount of benefits obtained applied to a minimal fee schedule. The lawyer in the Murray case, Brian Sutter, ended up with a fee amounting to $8.11 per hour for the necessary 80 hours he worked to get Emma Murray the benefits she was entitled to. The Supreme Court today ruled he was entitled to $16,000.00, or approximately as much as the defense attorney in the case charged to the insurance company that was fighting the losing battle over a little over $3,000.00 in benefits.
Congratulations are in order to Mr. Sutter , the trial attorney, Bill McCabe, one of the appellate attorneys and Richard Sicking, who argued the case in the Supreme Court.
I will be quite interested to watch the fallout. Workers' Compensation insurance rates have fallen or will fall with the next rate change, 60% over the past 5 years. The word 'crisis' is already being bandied about by the Chamber of Commerce referring to the Murray case. A special session of the legislature to try to 'fix' the perceived problem is already being threatened by the insurance industry. But the question I'd like the answer to is this: Tomorrow when the newspapers are printed and delivered, will anyone in the press notice, or care? Although more workers are affected by injuries on the job and more families are placed in economic peril by an unfair law that is supposed to take care of injured workers than all the medical malpractice and all the products liability cases combined, the workers' compensation horror stories get very little attention in the mass media.
Even with today's decision that will restore of the right of a victim of an on the job accident to have an attorney represent them, benefits are so low and the provision of them is so slow, that all the lawyers in the state can't make the victim whole.
A client of mine recently took her own life while her award of permanent total disability benefits was held up pending a frivolous appeal by the insurance company. She could no longer bear the pain exist without income. And she had a lawyer. And she won her case at trial. And she won her case on appeal, posthumously. How many more have to die?