Louisiana Court Denies Appeal of Worker Claiming Work Environment Caused Brain Injury
Recent Cases in Law and Neuroscience, Curated by the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior and the Shen Neurolaw Lab with support from the Dana Foundation
On December 16, 2020, a Louisiana Court of Appeals affirmed a Workers’ Compensation Judge’s dismissal of Chad Yokum’s complaint against an insurance company and an industrial laundry service specializing in cleaning hospital linens, Westport Linen Services, LLC. Yokum filed his claims against the companies after discovering that he suffered from a brain abscess, which he claimed was caused by his work for the laundry service.
Yokum began working for Westport Linen Services in 2016. A few days after he began working there, Yokum hit his head twice on a washer door and went to the hospital for treatment. A CT scan showed a lesion on Yokum’s left posterior parietal lobe. A neurosurgeon performed a craniotomy, resected the lesion, and performed a biopsy, which indicated the presence of the bacteria streptococcus intermedius. Yokum returned to the hospital a few weeks later, where a second CT scan showed a mass in the left parietal lobe with edema, believed to be a residual brain abscess from his craniotomy. Yokum again returned to the hospital a few weeks later, and a third CT scan found a lesion in the left parietal lobe, leading to a second craniotomy. The following day, Yokum had a stroke that resulted in his permanent impairment.
In June 2017, Yokum filed a Disputed Claim for Compensation in worker’s compensation court. Yokum’s treating physicians did not indicate that the laundry affirmatively caused the brain abscess. One opined that Yokum’s “head trauma was unrelated to the brain abscess” and the other stated that there was “no obvious cause” for the abscess. The Workers’ Compensation Judge also credited the testimony of the defendants’ infectious disease expert, who stated that “Mr. Yokum’s brain abscess developed before his first day at work at the laundry, and his alleged bumps on the head did not cause or aggravate his brain abscess but actually sort of led to the diagnosis.” The defendants’ expert cited evidence that the abscess was at least 14 days old when Yokum first came to the hospital, by which point Yokum had been working at Westport Linen Services for less than a week. The worker’s compensation court therefore dismissed the case “on the grounds that Mr. Yokum produced no evidence of medical causation.” Yokum appealed.
The appeals court affirmed that judgement, stating that “we find there are no genuine issues of material fact in this matter, and the [Workers’ Compensation Judge] was correct in granting Defendants’ motion for summary judgment.”
Key words: worker’s compensation, brain injury, brain abscess, CT scan, Louisiana
Citation: Yokum v. Westport Linen Services, LLC, 2020 WL 7382178
This post is the 33rd post as part of an ongoing Center for Law, Brain & Behavior (CLBB) series tracking the latest developments in law and neuroscience cases. To see previous posts about recent cases, see the full case archive on the CLBB website. To see updates on legal scholarship, see the Neurolaw News, hosted by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience. This project is made possible through support of the Dana Foundation.
