OK.  If you think I did that for shameless clicks -- guilty!  But wait a second.  It’s not as bad as you think.  First, it is certainly a little crazy that there’s a 100-year-old decision, from the Supreme Court of Kansas, captioned Taylor v. Swift & Co.  And wait, there’s more.  At issue was coverage for a worker’s compensation claim.  But hold on, there’s still even more.  At issue was whether the injury was caused by an accident.  Regular readers of Coverage Opinions know that I have long-discussed such question being the most litigated and unpredictable liability coverage issue of them all.  Indeed, courts have been struggling with it with since at least the mid-1800s. 

Now do think that headline was so shameless? Or at least a little less so.  

As for the case, in Taylor v. Swift & Co. (hereinafter “Taylor Swift”), the Kansas high court addressed whether injury caused by exposure to very low temperatures, while working in and out of a meat-cooling plant, qualified as an accident for purposes of worker’s compensation recovery.  The Taylor Swift court held that it did not:

“That statute awards compensation for accidents and consequent injuries arising in the course of the workman's employment and because of it. But there must be some accident, some mishap, some untoward, unexpected event arising out of and in the course of the employment from which the injury is occasioned. (citations omitted).  Here there was no accident. The exposure caused by working in and out of a cooler or refrigerated wareroom is undoubtedly hard on the human constitution, it may wear down and gradually weaken a workman’s powers of endurance and render him more liable to various diseases, including possibly transverse myelitis as contended for in this case by plaintiff, but such work and such exposure, although regrettable consequences flow therefrom, do not constitute an industrial accident within the meaning of the compensation act.”

By the way, in case you are wondering.  I checked.  There is no reported decision involving a case captioned Travis v. Kelce & Co.