Judicial Notice in Workers' Compensation

Tampa, FL (WorkersCompensation.com) - Workers’ Compensation litigation is unique when compared to other cases such as personal injury or medical malpractice. Some of the proceedings are controlled by a state’s workers’ compensation procedure. But those rules oftentimes defer to the state’s rules of civil procedure or rules of evidence. Judicial notice is one tool that can be used in workers’ compensation.

Judicial notice is an evidentiary tool that allows a party to request that the court itself conclude that a fact is true for purposes of litigation. When judicial notice is taken, the fact is conclusively established and does not need to be otherwise proven by offering exhibits or testimony.

The reasons you would want the judge to take judicial notice is it can allow you to establish facts in the case which would otherwise require the testimony of a witness or the introduction of documents.

Moreover, judicial notice can also allow you to get the court to look at laws or regulations from other jurisdictions. For example, maybe you want the court to look at the definition of employee in the IRS code or in a federal regulation because you want to use case law for how that definition was interpreted. You could use judicial notice to ask the court to look at the federal law without having to call a witness or authenticate federal law.

Most importantly, judicial notice can be used to establish facts in the litigation. The rules say that judicial notice can be taken whenever the facts are not subject to dispute because they are generally known within the territorial jurisdiction of the court.

Perhaps the most common fact that judicial notice is used for is matters of geography. If the accident occurred within the jurisdiction of the court, you might ask the court to take judicial notice of a map or the names of certain streets where the accident occurred. This could be particularly important in lunch time or motor vehicle accident cases.

But given that some judges of compensation claims are members of the executive branch of the state government, some argue that the workers’ compensation judges should be able to take judicial notice of public records that are connected to the state government.

For example, say you want to point out that some assistant who works with one of the experts or doctor’s offices is not licensed by the state’s department of health. You could ask the court to take judicial notice of another branch of the executive department’s public records, or the absence of that public record.

In many states, public records or the absence of something in public records are self-authenticating documents. Moreover, many states have exceptions under the hearsay rule for public records. This would be an alternative way to get this matter into evidence if the court denies the request for judicial notice.

Judicial notice can be requested in the form of a motion or orally at a hearing. We will have to wait and see if more litigators start requesting judicial notice in workers’ compensation proceedings. 

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