“A customer attacked me.”

The psychiatric part matters most

For injuries on or after January 1, 2013, Labor Code § 4660.1(c)(1) normally blocks any increase in your rating for a psychiatric disorder arising as a consequence of a physical injury.

Section 4660.1(c)(2) carves out an exception where the psychiatric injury results from being a victim of a violent act, or direct exposure to a significant violent act.

Being assaulted at work is exactly that. Which means the psychiatric component of your injury is ratable, where for most injured workers it is not. This is one of the most valuable and least-claimed provisions in the statute, and it is routinely missed because nobody connects the assault to the rating rule. How psychiatric injury works.

Ask for the Violent Incident Log

Labor Code § 6401.9, effective July 1, 2024, requires nearly every California employer to maintain a workplace violence prevention plan and a Violent Incident Log recording every incident.

Ask for it by name, in writing. It is a contemporaneous record made by your employer, and in an assault claim it is frequently the strongest single piece of evidence in the file — including for prior incidents that show the employer knew about the risk.

If they have no log, that is a finding too.

The second case

Workers’ compensation is the exclusive remedyExclusive remedy Workers’ compensation is generally the only claim against your employer. It is not the only claim against anyone else. against your employer. It is not the exclusive remedy against the person who assaulted you, or against a third party whose negligence allowed it.

Depending on the facts, that can include the assailant, a property owner or landlord who failed to provide security in a foreseeable-risk setting, or a security contractor. A civil case pays for pain and suffering, which workers’ compensation does not. When a third-party case exists.

The bar that usually comes up, and it is narrow

The law excludes an injury arising out of an altercation in which the injured employee is the initial physical aggressor.

Initial physical aggressor. Not the person who spoke first, not the person who was rude, not the person the employer would rather blame. Verbal exchange is not physical aggression, and defending yourself is not initiating.