He called in a day early, then missed the hearing that decided it all
Miss the deadlines, skip the hearing, and even a real workplace fall won't save a comp claim. A Tennessee appeals board just made that plain.
The board, in a decision filed August 28, 2026, upheld a warehouse employer's summary judgment win against a worker whose ongoing pain, the medical proof showed, traced to arthritis rather than his fall.
It started on the dock. In June 2022, the worker fell while connecting hooks to cargo being lifted off a boat at Fullen Dock and Warehouse, LLC. A coworker drove him to a hospital, where he reported dropping about 6 feet, with no loss of consciousness, and pain in his neck, back, and shoulders. CT scans came back normal. The diagnosis: a back contusion and a scalp hematoma.
The employer did the textbook thing. It accepted the claim under the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act and offered the worker his pick of treating physician. He named none, so the employer lined up an orthopedic specialist.
Before that visit, the worker sought care on his own. Those records reflect a different account of the fall - about twenty feet, with a loss of consciousness. In August 2022, the employer terminated him for excessive absences and tardiness.
Then the medical record hardened against him. At the first authorized appointment, the specialist found no sign of acute injury on X-rays. MRIs showed mostly degenerative changes in the spine. The physician sent the worker back to full duty at maximum medical improvement and assigned a 0% permanent impairment rating. He later testified the fall caused neither a lasting impairment nor the degenerative changes, and that any further treatment the worker needed was for non-work-related arthritis.
That testimony did the heavy lifting. The trial court denied benefits, and the board affirmed. On remand, the worker took no depositions and filed no added proof before his deadlines passed. When the employer moved for summary judgment - a request to decide a case without a trial when the key facts are not truly in dispute - he neither responded nor showed up.
The timing was close. Court records show he tried to call in for the hearing a day early, on a Sunday, and emailed to confirm the date and time. Staff gave him the correct schedule. The court waited five minutes past the start time, then went ahead without him.
With no rebuttal on the table, the trial court ruled the employer had negated causation - the element requiring the job to contribute more than 50% to the injury - and dismissed the petition. On appeal, the worker's notice said only that he was "in constant pain and it [is] 100% [the employer's] fault." He filed no brief. The board affirmed and certified the order as final.
For HR and workers' comp teams, the case is a quiet playbook. An authorized treating physician's causation opinion, taken by deposition and left unchallenged, can carry an entire defense. Documentation - the acceptance, the physician choice offered, the impairment rating - builds the record that summary judgment rests on. And a claimant's own procedural missteps can end a claim before any judge weighs the merits.
