The Illinois Supreme Court has overturned two lower court rulings that put a time limit on carpal tunnel workers' compensation claims.
The court ruled earlier this month in the case of Deana Durand vs. The Industrial Commission that just because the claimant first experienced pain in her wrists in 1997 it does not mean the eventual claim was barred because of statute of limitations.
The ruling overturned the findings of the Illinois Industrial Commission, which administers the state's workers' comp system, and a trial and appeals court, which turned down the claim because it was not filed in a timely fashion.
Ms. Durand was a policy administrator for RLI Insurance Corp. who spent about six hours a day on a keyboard, and first filed a workers' compensation claim four years after first experiencing the symptoms.
The issue boiled down to the so-called manifestation date, which the high court said "is not the date on which the injury and its causal link to work became plainly apparent to a reasonable physician, but the date it became plainly apparent to a reasonable employee."
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