Excerpted from the SEAK’s Course: How to Excel as an Expert Witness in Workers’ Compensation Cases: Special Techniques

– I mean there’s no question about that.

– Well, on the opposite end of that, real quickly, when I’m looking at permanent and total disability, to get back to Steve’s point about asking about activities of daily living and what you do in your spare time, if the employee tells me, at trial or as shared with the independent examiner or the expert treating physician, during questioning that, “Look, yeah, I’m not working and I can never go back to work. But in my free time, my 40 hours that I have, at home during the day, I watch my young kids and I drag them to school and I go to their sporting activities and…” You know, from my perspective, I’m going, “And you can’t work but you can do that?” So those are important questions. They’re part of my analysis as what is the employee doing if he or she isn’t at work. Are they really laying in bed all day or are they doing something else?