How we research and review this site

What we cite

The statute, not a summary of the statute. When a page says you have one year to file, it names Labor Code § 5405. When it says your employer has to keep paying while a treatment dispute is pending, it names § 4610 and the utilization reviewUR Utilization Review. The process that approves, modifies, or denies each treatment request. A modification is a denial of what it left out. regulations at 8 CCR § 9792.9.1. You can go read them. We link them where a stable public link exists.

Published and en banc decisions by name and year. Nunes. Almaraz/GuzmanAlmaraz/Guzman The doctrine permitting a physician to depart from the strict AMA rating where it does not accurately reflect the impairment, using another method inside the “four corners” of the Guides.. Lindh. Hikida — and County of Santa Clara v. WCABWCAB Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board. The court system that decides these cases. 23 district offices statewide. (Justice), which narrowed it. Wilson v. Cal Fire. Where a case is a panel decision rather than binding authority, we say so, because the difference matters and it is exactly the kind of distinction that gets flattened in general-audience writing.

The Division of Workers’ Compensation’s own numbers. The temporary disabilityTD / TTD / TPD Temporary Disability, Total or Partial. Wage replacement while recovering. Two-thirds of average weekly earnings; 2026 maximum $1,764.11/week. maximum, the permanent disabilityPD Permanent Disability. Compensation for lasting impairment. A different and much lower weekly rate — 2026 maximum $290/week. weekly rate, the mileage rate, the death benefit amounts. These change. See below.

What we do not cite: other law firm websites. Not once, anywhere on this site. If we can’t find it in a primary source, we don’t publish it.

What every page carries

At the bottom of every substantive page:

• The attorney who reviewed it, by name.
• The date it was last reviewed — not the date it was written, the date someone last checked it against current law.
• A link back here, and a link to report an error.

A review date is a promise, and an old one is information too. If a page says it was last reviewed eighteen months ago, that tells you something real about how much weight to put on it. We would rather show you that than hide it.

The dates that force a rewrite

California workers’ compensation changes on a schedule, and some of those changes invalidate published material overnight.

January 1 of every year. The temporary disability minimum and maximum reset with the state average weekly wage. The death benefit figures, the earnings thresholds, and the mileage rate move. A page that quotes last year’s temporary disability maximum with this year’s review date is worse than a page that quotes nothing, because it looks current. Every figure on this site is re-verified against the DWCDWC Division of Workers’ Compensation, part of the Department of Industrial Relations. Administers the system. Information Services Center: 1-800-736-7401.’s published rates each January, and the review dates move only when the check is actually done.

Every legislative session. Bills that pass in the fall take effect January 1 unless they say otherwise, and some take effect mid-year. Bills that are vetoed also matter, because material written in anticipation of them goes stale in the other direction. AB 1336, vetoed on October 13, 2025, is one.

Sunset dates. This is the one almost everybody misses, and it is the one that caught us. A statute amended with an expiration date reverts to its prior text on that date — silently, with no announcement and no new bill number. Labor Code § 5909 is the live example, and it turned out to be a better example than we first thought. Under AB 171 (Stats. 2024, ch. 52), from July 2, 2024, the Board’s 60-day reconsideration clock ran from the date a judge transmitted the case, and that version carried its own repeal date of July 1, 2026. We had the date on our calendar. The calendar fired, and we published the reversion it predicted. The reversion did not happen. SB 171 (Stats. 2026, ch. 83), chaptered July 13, 2026, deleted the sunset and repealed the filing-trigger version — twelve days after the day it was supposed to take effect. The transmittal trigger is now permanent, and for a while this site said the opposite. A sunset date is a prediction about what the Legislature will not do, not a statement of what the law says. So tracking sunset dates is not the safeguard; it is the alarm. The date now triggers a re-read of the section as chaptered, and nothing publishes off the calendar alone. We re-read this one on August 23, 2026 and logged the correction.

Regulatory effective dates. The utilization review regulations restructured on April 1, 2026. The Medical Treatment Utilization ScheduleMTUS Medical Treatment Utilization Schedule. California’s treatment guidelines. Four of them — shoulder, elbow, hand/wrist/forearm and traumatic brain injury — were replaced January 2, 2026. replaced four of its guidelines on January 2, 2026. Neither of those was a statute; both changed what a claims administratorClaims administrator / adjuster The person handling your claim for the insurer or self-insured employer. may lawfully do.

Physical facts. WCAB district office addresses, hours, and filing procedures. A wrong courthouse address on a page someone relies on to appear at a hearing is the worst error this site could make, and we re-verify every office we publish on a recurring schedule rather than once.

What we will not publish

A number we cannot source. Average settlement values are the clearest example. There is no reliable public dataset of California workers’ compensation settlement outcomes, so an “average case” figure cannot tell you anything about yours. We explain what actually drives a settlement number instead, and we show the arithmetic.

A promise about your case. No page here says what you will get. Several say plainly when you probably do not need a lawyer at all.

A case result without the context that makes it meaningful. A seven-figure result tells you what a catastrophic injuryCatastrophic injury Under § 4660.1(c)(2)(B), “including, but not limited to, loss of a limb, paralysis, severe burn, or severe head injury.” Lifts the bar on psychiatric ratings. with clear liability produced. It tells you almost nothing about a shoulder claim. Where we publish results, we publish the ordinary ones alongside the large ones, because the ordinary ones are what most cases look like.

Content generated and posted without a lawyer reading it. Research assistance and drafting tools are used in producing this site. Nothing publishes without an attorney reviewing it against the sources, and the attorney’s name is on the page. The name at the bottom of the page is the accountability, and it is a real one.

Anything designed to make you afraid. Deadline pressure on this site is real deadline pressure — the statute of limitations is genuinely one year, and it genuinely does bar claims. We will tell you that clearly. We will not manufacture urgency that does not exist.

When we get it wrong

We will. This site covers a body of law with roughly a hundred operative statutes, several hundred regulations, and a case law stream that produces significant panel decisions monthly. Some of it will be wrong, and some of what is right today will be wrong in March.

Tell us. Report an error. You do not have to be a lawyer, you do not have to be a client, and you do not have to be polite about it.

What happens then: we check it against the primary source, we fix it if it is wrong, and — for anything substantive — we note on the page that it was corrected and when. Substantive corrections are also listed on the corrections page.

Who reviews

Jamey Teitell, Partner and Trial Attorney, reviews the workers’ compensation content on this site. More about Jamey.

The firm has represented injured workers in Southern California since 1965. About the firm.

Why we bothered writing this page

Because the whole site rests on you believing what is on it, and there is no reason you should, by default. So this site says what accurate means to it, publishes the date each page was last checked, names the person responsible, and invites correction.

Those four things are cheap to do and almost nobody does them. That is the entire argument.

Questions about something on this site, or something a page here didn’t answer: (213) 380-9310 · English, Spanish, or Korean