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Labor Code section 5710 has been clear for decades about who pays. When the employer or carrier takes the deposition of a represented injured worker, the applicant's counsel is entitled to a reasonable allowance for attorney's fees, and the employer or its insurer writes the check. The worker also gets travel and meal expenses, wages lost attending, one copy of the transcript at no cost, and an interpreter where one is needed.

Cumulative trauma claims are now more than a quarter of all workers' compensation filings in California, and they are the most disputed claims in the system. A specific injury has a date, a mechanism, and usually a clear story. A cumulative trauma claim has none of those handed to it. It has to be built, element by element, out of a medical and employment history that stretches across years.

California employers are getting a bigger workers' compensation bill. On July 10, 2026, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara adopted a new advisory pure premium rate of $1.65 per $100 of payroll, a 6.6% increase that takes effect September 1. It is the second straight annual increase, after a decade in which the benchmark mostly fell.

Two people are going to read the same 500 pages of medical records on this claim. Your paralegal is one. A defense reviewer is the other. They read the same file looking for opposite things. Your side reads to get organized: sort by provider, put it in date order, tab the imaging, make it easy for an attorney to find things. The defense reads to find the one line that does not fit, the contradiction that turns a solid claim into a disputed one.

Every January, California's workers' compensation benefit rates shift, and 2026 was no exception. For the attorneys and paralegals who keep cases moving, these adjustments are easy to file under "the carrier's problem." They are not. When a benefit rate is applied incorrectly, the ripple reaches the applicant, the settlement math, and eventually the firm that has to untangle it.

In May 2026, the California Division of Workers' Compensation released a RAND-authored report evaluating the long-term sustainability of the state's Medical-Legal process. One of the study's five core research questions was blunt: how can California improve the timely delivery of medical records to Qualified Medical Evaluators?

On May 21, 2026, the Division of Workers' Compensation released a 172-page RAND Corporation study examining whether California's Qualified Medical Evaluator system is sustainable and still serving its original purpose. The study drew on DIR data spanning 2012 to 2024 and stakeholder interviews with attorneys, claims representatives, QMEs, and injured workers.

How to get medical and employment records in a California workers' comp case: Authorization vs Subpoena, the Notice to Consumer rule, and faster retrieval.

EAMS e-filing guide for California workers' comp firms. The correct document titles, why filings get rejected, and how to fix each error.