Alabama court strips worker of total disability benefits despite serious injury

What followed, however, told a more complicated story. Shortly after the accident, Dean returned to work in a sedentary office capacity. After reaching maximum medical improvement in May 2019, he resumed working as a brick mason. During periods of no work, he applied for unemployment benefits five times, each time certifying that he was physically able to work full-time in his trade. In November 2021, he applied for a job at Walmart as an order filler – a physically demanding role requiring bending, twisting, lifting up to 60 pounds, and extended periods of standing and walking – and confirmed he could meet all its requirements. He ended up working as a forklift operator instead. He earned nearly $40,000 in 2022. By 2023, he was back doing part-time brick mason work through his union. 

Yet in June 2025, a trial court awarded Dean over $226,000 in accrued disability benefits plus nearly $667 a week in ongoing payments, finding him permanently and totally disabled and incapable of any gainful employment. 

The appellate court was unconvinced. The record showed that Dean had consistently found and held jobs, earned meaningful wages across several years, and had never presented any evidence showing his condition had deteriorated to the point of making him unable to work within his established physical limitations. His own occupational therapist, who had evaluated his physical capacity back in 2019, confirmed before trial that his assessment had not changed – Dean could still handle light-duty work and some medium-duty tasks. 

Alabama law sets a high bar for permanent total disability. It is not enough to show that a worker can no longer do the specific job they held before getting hurt. The law requires proof that the person cannot secure any gainful employment at all. Dean, the court found, had not met that standard. The judgment was reversed and the case sent back to the trial court. 

For HR teams, the case is a useful reminder of how important thorough documentation is across the full arc of a workers’ compensation claim. The details that ultimately undermined Dean’s case – his unemployment applications, his Walmart employment records, his earnings history, his own statements about being able to work – were all part of the documentary record, and none of it was disputed.