The Division of Workers’ Compensation has added thorough quality assurance checklists for med-legal evaluators to its website that could also be useful for attorneys, hearing representatives and other practitioners as well.

John P. Kamin

A team of doctors, attorneys and judges teamed up and created the checklists in an effort to improve med-legal reporting by physicians in the workers’ compensation system. There is one checklist for most med-legal exams, and a second checklist that focuses on psych med-legal exams.

The checklists are available at this link.

A helpful tool in the box

These checklists could really help avoid some of the common errors we see in med-legal reports, which lead the parties to set the depositions of med-legal evaluators.

When I think back on flaws in QME reports, a few examples come to mind:

• The doctor says a body part is injured, but doesn’t explain the mechanism of causation and ignores the fact that there are multiple specific and cumulative trauma dates of injury.
• A final medical report that says the whole-person impairment is somewhere between 5% to 8%, but doesn’t specify which number it is.
• Reports that don’t comment on temporary disability and work restrictions, despite specifically asking for comment on those topics.
• No discussion of apportionment.
• Review of medical records that were not submitted by either party and appear to be from a different case entirely.
• Asking for diagnostic tests, which are provided by the parties, only to ask for the same diagnostic tests in a later report.

If it helps doctors avoid those problems by using the checklists to write better reports, then all parties could benefit by having to do less discovery (fewer supplemental reports, depositions, reevaluations).

Likewise, attorneys could also use the checklists to prepare for doctor depositions and help make sure that their reports are substantial medical evidence. After all, if a case is set for trial and the judge has only sloppy medical reports that raise more questions than answers, that judge is going to cite McDuffie v. Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority (2002) and reopen discovery to ask the med-legal experts more questions until their reporting is satisfactory.

Judges who issue decisions based on bad reports run the risk of being ordered by the Workers' Compensation Appeals Board to reopen the record and order more discovery until the reporting is substantial medical evidence. This result is disfavored by savvy judges and parties because it creates a lot more work for everyone.

Nobody wants to do unnecessary work, so it behooves the parties to try to get substantial medical evidence sooner rather than later.

Sound familiar? Here's why.

If these checklists sound familiar to you, it’s probably because you are recalling the fact that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1293 into law in 2025, which would require the creation of a template form for QME reports. However, these specific checklists were not made in response to that bill and were actually crafted while the bill was making its way through the Legislature. According to one of the authors of the checklists, it was not known for certain whether AB 1293 was going to be approved.

So while it’s fair to anticipate that the DWC will keep these checklists in mind as they craft regulations to supplement AB 1293, technically, the checklists and the bill were separate efforts in 2025.

John P. Kamin is a workers’ compensation defense attorney and partner at Bradford & Barthel’s Woodland Hills location. He is WorkCompCentral's former legal editor. This entry from Bradford & Barthel's blog appears with permission.