Margie Mullins v. Leggett & Platt

OPINION OF THE COURT BY

CHIEF JUSTICE MINTON

The Chief Administrative Law Judge approved Margie Mullins’s settlement of her workers’ compensation claim for weekly permanent-partial disability benefits and her election to accelerate the payment of her attorney’s fee to a lump-sum amount. Indisputably, the lump-sum attorney’s fee payment reduced Mullins’s weekly benefit amount pro-rata. But in calculating Mullins’s weekly benefits remaining after deduction of the attorney’s fee, the employer’s workers’ compensation insurance carrier applied a multiplier reflecting the future periodic payment of…