Virginia Supreme Court Defines Injury By Accident in Workers’ Compensation Case

The Virginia Code does not provide a definition for “injury by accident”; Virginia courts have been left to define the term. The predominant definition eventually became “an identifiable incident that occurred at a reasonably definite time.” While this definition provides some clarity, the Workers’ Compensation Commission and courts have struggled to determine exactly what constitutes an identifiable incident occurring at a reasonably definite time. To add additional clarification, two further definitions were offered. An injury could meet the injury by accident standard if it occurred in “a single piece of work” or if it was “bounded by rigid temporal precision”, but not if the injury was caused by repetitive actions during that period.

Even with these new definitions, one scenario remained problematic: what happens when a claimant performs work over a short period of time, later finds they have sustained an injury during that period, but is unable to point to a specific moment when the injury occurred? Over the past decade, the Virginia Court of Appeals has taken up variations on this scenario and has held that the scenario can constitute an injury by accident, relying on the “single piece of work” and “bounded by rigid temporal precision” definitions. Over time, the Court of Appeals appeared to be equating a four-hour period with the “sufficiently temporally precise” standard, such that if an injury occurred over less than four hours, it could be compensable even if the particular moment of injury was not identified.

Notably, the Opinions in these cases all came from the Court of Appeals. The Commonwealth’s highest court, Supreme Court of Virginia, had not addressed these new definitions until now. In City of Charlottesville v. Sclafani (Va. S. Ct. Aug. 26, 2021), the claimant was a SWAT team member taking part in a training session. The session began at 8:00 a.m., paused at noon for an hour-long lunch break, then continued for another four hours before concluding at 5:00 p.m. The claimant was selected to be the “suspect” in the training activities. In this role, he was repeatedly handcuffed, thrown to the ground, and picked up from the ground while handcuffed by members of the SWAT team.

The claimant did not notice any symptoms during the morning session or lunch break. While driving home after the four-hour afternoon session, the claimant’s shoulder began to hurt. He subsequently was diagnosed with a shoulder injury. The employer argued that the injury did not occur at a reasonably definite time because the claimant could not state exactly when during the eight hour training session he hurt his shoulder.

The Court of Appeals resolved this argument by finding that, because the claimant did not notice any injury during the four-hour morning training session, he was therefore injured “at some point after lunch.” This brought the period down to four hours from the eight hours argued by the employer. The Court of Appeals then found that this four-hour period was “sufficiently temporally precise” to constitute an injury by accident. This continued a trend from other cases in which the Court of Appeals had essentially equated a four-hour period with the “sufficiently temporally precise” standard.

When the Supreme Court took up Sclafani, many workers’ compensation lawyers in Virginia hoped that the Court would definitively uphold or reject the Court of Appeals’ treatment of these cases and the reasoning behind the apparent four-hour standard. While the Court appeared ready to do so, the specific facts of Sclafani prevented a clean resolution of the issue. The Supreme Court first held that the Court of Appeals’ apparent use of a “bright-line rule that a four-hour time period is sufficiently temporally precise to establish an injury” was improper. The Court explained that “a claim asserting that an injury occurred during a time period where multiple potential causative events occur is not sufficiently temporally precise to establish a compensable injury.” This statement contradicts the reasoning used by the Court of Appeals in recent cases that had led to findings like the one in Sclafani, and suggests that the scenario identified above could not constitute an injury by accident.

While these statements go some way towards resolving the questions at issue, the Court did not take the next step and carry its reasoning into an application to the facts of the case, which would likely have provided much more clarity on the issues and shown where this doctrine would be headed in the future. Instead, the Court reviewed the record and saw that the claimant had testified that he felt discomfort when he was picked up during the last training scenario of the day, and testified that this particular incident caused his injury. The Court noted that the City had appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court on the basis that the claimant had never established a particular moment of injury when, in fact, he had testified to a moment of injury and the City never challenged this testimony. The Court therefore affirmed the Court of Appeals, but on different grounds, finding that the claimant’s testimony established that the injury occurred when the claimant was picked up during the last training scenario. By doing so, the Court effectively removed this case from the scenario outlined above; the claimant testified to a definitive moment of injury, which was uncontradicted. Therefore, any further analysis was unnecessary.

Sclafani is encouraging to the extent that it shows that the Supreme Court does not agree with the Court of Appeals’ reasoning in cases where a moment of injury cannot be identified. Nevertheless, the facts of Sclafani meant that it was not the ideal case to test whether the Supreme Court would wholly reject the Commission’s and Court of Appeals’ ability to find a compensable injury by accident in the scenario outlined above. Thus, final resolution of this question will likely require further litigation, as the Court of Appeals will be faced with interpreting and applying the Supreme Court’s ruling in Sclafani to future cases.