DATE:

October 8, 2004

TO:

Workers' Compensation Practitioners

FROM:

Jack Nolish, Chief Magistrate

The consolidation of the various Agency hearing sites has produced a situation where participants in the system may have to travel increased distances to the hearing sites. To better serve our customers, we are making certain information available by telephone so some travel can be eliminated.

Effective immediately, staff in the Detroit hearings office file room will answer phone inquiries regarding dates assigned at the initial pretrial. They will accomplish this by checking the Agency’s computer system for information, which means they can ascertain these dates for cases pending in all hearings offices statewide. Please call: 313-456-3656. There are three phone lines attached to this number but there is no voice-mail. If you get a busy signal, please call again. Since the file room where these calls will be handled is busiest in the morning, we ask that the inquiry calls be made in the afternoon. Also, we ask that inquiry calls be made no less than 3 business days after the scheduled pretrial date. This will allow for staff to have time to input the dates assigned by the magistrates. Please have the Social Security number for the employee available when you call. The Agency computer system indexes cases by that number. Although name look-up is possible, it is significantly slower and there are many “Jones” files.

Please feel free to address any comments regarding this new service to my attention or Anne Williams at the Detroit office.