CaliforniaCoverage
California WCAB corpus coverage.
Before you rely on anything on this site, this is the whole of it: how many decisions, from when, of what kind, what was extracted from each, and the things we do not have. The gaps are the part worth reading.
- Released decisions
- 5,374
- With the official PDF
- 5,100
- Decision dates
- 1997–2026
- Jurisdictions
- California only
Decisions of the California Workers' Compensation Appeals Board, as the state publishes them on dir.ca.gov. Most carry a decision date between 2021 and today; 145 are older, back to 1997, because the Board's en banc archive reaches further than its panel archive.
- 138En banc →
Binding on every WCAB panel and workers’ compensation judge until a court says otherwise.
Not binding. Designated by the Board as worth reading, and cited as persuasive.
- 4,933Panel decision →
Three commissioners answering a petition for reconsideration or removal. Persuasive only.
The Board declining to take the case up, usually adopting the judge’s report.
Other released orders — dismissals, orders on removal, procedural rulings.
What is pulled out of each decision
Extracted by AI and kept only where the passage behind it checked against the source text. Each one shows that passage and its page, so you can disagree with us and read the decision instead.
- Disputed issues, with the outcome
- 6,757
- Medical opinions, with the weight given
- 4,290
- Authorities named, with how they were applied
- 9,758
- Facts the panel treated as deciding it
- 10,070
Alongside the decisions: the state's register of 3,878 qualified medical evaluators, copied from DWC — who is registered, in what, and where.
What a panel decision is worth
An en banc decision binds every panel and every workers' compensation judge. A panel decision does not bind anybody — it is persuasive, and the other side will say so. Nothing on this site changes that, and the ranking of a search result is a measure of factual similarity, never of authority.
We do not summarise a decision into a verdict, score a judge, an evaluator or a firm, or tell you what your case is worth. Nothing here is legal advice.
What is not here
Court of Appeal and Supreme Court decisions
Published appellate authority binds the Board and is where a point of law starts. It is not here. Look it up in the reporters or on a paid database.
Trial-level decisions by workers’ compensation judges
The state does not publish them, so nobody has a corpus of them. What you see here begins one step above: the Board reviewing a judge.
Writ denied cases
A denial of a petition for writ of review carries weight practitioners argue over. We do not track which decisions were taken up on writ or what happened there.
A citator
We cannot tell you whether a decision was later disapproved, superseded or distinguished. Check that yourself before you rely on anything here.
Settlements, C&Rs and stipulations
How most claims actually end. None of it is published, so none of it is countable — which is why the statistics here describe appeals and not claims.
Anything outside California, and anything paywalled
One jurisdiction, public records only. No headnotes or editorial material from a commercial database.
Names
The injured worker is not named on these pages. The state names its own files after them, so the link to the official PDF goes through a redirect of ours rather than printing that filename, and their name is struck out of the quoted passages. Physicians and firms appear as the decision names them: that is what a public proceeding records.
How the corpus is built →What happened on reconsideration →Privacy →
About this corpus
What California WCAB decisions does SimilarCase actually hold?
Released Board decisions as DIR publishes them, mostly 2021 onward for ordinary panels, with older en banc files. Each coverage figure on this page is a count from that corpus, including what was extracted and what was not.
What is not in the corpus?
No Court of Appeal or Supreme Court opinions, no trial-level WCJ decisions, no citator, no settlements, no other states. Those gaps are listed on this page on purpose. Check binding authority yourself.
Private workspace
Your case already resembles someone else’s. Find whose.
Paste the dispute. The extractor builds the factors, the search finds the decisions the same facts won, and the matter stays saved. Free account.