“Eman at Yazdchi Law was extremely professional, responsive, and supportive at all times. He and his staff exceeded all of my expectations.”
Andrea Dalessandro
✦ Board-Certified Specialist in Workers’ Compensation Law — State Bar of California ✦
Back injuries are the #1 workers’ comp claim in California — and among the most undervalued.
By Eman Yazdchi, Esq. · Certified Specialist in Workers' Compensation Law
Back injuries are the most frequent and most fiercely contested workers' compensation claims in Long Beach, and the reason is simple economics. The city's dominant industries — port operations, oil refining, construction, and healthcare — all place extraordinary physical demands on the human spine, and the resulting injuries carry staggering medical costs. A single lumbar fusion surgery runs $150,000 or more. Post-surgical care including pain management injections, physical therapy, and potential revision surgery can double that figure over a lifetime. Insurance carriers insuring Long Beach employers know these numbers intimately, and they fight back injury claims with every tool at their disposal: biased medical examiners, aggressive apportionment arguments, and lowball settlement offers designed to close the file before the full extent of the damage is known.
The back injuries we see from Long Beach workers reflect the physical intensity of the city's economy. A longshoreman at the Port of Long Beach who has spent twenty years unloading container ships, climbing ship ladders, and wrestling heavy cargo into position develops multi-level lumbar disc herniations that eventually require fusion surgery. A construction worker building a new port terminal falls from scaffolding and suffers a burst fracture at L1, leaving him with permanent hardware in his spine and a lifetime of limitations. A nurse at Long Beach Memorial lifts a 250-pound patient who is falling out of bed and feels her lumbar disc rupture instantly. An oil refinery maintenance worker who has spent years climbing pipe racks and carrying heavy tools develops degenerative disc disease accelerated by the relentless physical demands of turnaround work. Each of these cases has different medical characteristics, different apportionment issues, and different settlement values, but they all share a common thread: the insurer will fight to pay as little as possible.
California's apportionment rules under Labor Code sections 4663 and 4664 allow insurers to reduce their liability for the portion of disability caused by non-industrial factors. For back injuries in Long Beach's physical workforce, the insurer will invariably point to age-related degeneration on the MRI and argue that the worker's disc bulges and facet arthropathy are the product of aging, not work. This argument has a superficial appeal — everyone's spine degenerates over time — but it collapses under proper medical-legal analysis. The question under California law is not whether degeneration exists, but whether the industrial work activities were a contributing cause of the disability. A longshoreman's spine does not degenerate in a vacuum; it degenerates under the specific physical stresses of port work, and the insurer must account for that reality.
Eman Yazdchi, our lead attorney, is a Board-Certified Specialist in Workers' Compensation Law with extensive experience handling back injury claims from Long Beach's port, refinery, aerospace, and healthcare sectors. He retains medical-legal evaluators who perform thorough biomechanical analyses linking the worker's spinal condition to their specific occupational demands.
Back injury cases at the Long Beach WCAB District Office require meticulous preparation because the permanent disability rating, future medical care projections, and apportionment analysis are all contested by the insurer. We know the Long Beach board's judges and the level of medical evidence they require to award the full permanent disability rating and future medical treatment a back injury warrants. Our approach is to build the medical record methodically: we ensure you are treating with a spine specialist who understands industrial injuries, we obtain detailed diagnostic imaging, and we arrange a comprehensive medical-legal evaluation that addresses causation, apportionment, the need for future surgery, and the permanent impairment rating under the AMA Guides.
We also evaluate whether your back injury supports additional benefits beyond standard permanent disability. If your injury prevents you from returning to your prior occupation, you are entitled to a supplemental job displacement voucher under Labor Code section 4658.7 for vocational retraining. If your permanent disability rating exceeds 70 percent, you may qualify for a life pension under Labor Code section 4659. These benefits are significant, and we pursue them in every qualifying case.
Injured at work in Long Beach? Call (661) 273-1780
Tap to call →After your free consultation, we ensure you are receiving treatment from a qualified spine specialist and arrange for comprehensive diagnostic imaging if it has not already been obtained. We file your claim at the Long Beach WCAB District Office and begin building the medical-legal record. A thorough medical-legal evaluation is the cornerstone of a back injury case — it addresses industrial causation, apportionment to non-industrial factors, the need for future treatment including potential surgery, and the permanent disability rating. We use this evaluation to negotiate aggressively with the insurance carrier, and if a fair settlement cannot be reached, we take the case to trial at the Long Beach board. Throughout the process, we monitor your medical treatment to ensure the insurer is authorizing the care you need, and we file penalties when they fail to do so. You pay no fees unless we recover benefits for you.
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