Nevada High Court: Police Department Bears Burden to Deny Officer's Heart Benefits

Robert Holland spent 25 years as an officer with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department before retiring in 2012. Like many first responders, he received annual physical exams required under Nevada law. Those exams flagged elevated triglycerides as a predisposing condition for heart disease, and his examining physician directed him in writing to address it.

In 2019, Holland suffered two heart attacks. He applied for workers' compensation benefits under Nevada's heart-disease presumption statute, NRS 617.457, which presumes that heart disease in a qualifying first responder arises out of employment. LVMPD denied the claim, arguing that Holland had failed to correct the predisposing condition despite the physician's written order. Under that reading, the burden would fall on Holland to disprove his own non-compliance.

Lisa Anderson of GGRM Law Firm, one of Nevada's longest-practicing certified workers' compensation specialists, took the case and challenged where the burden of proof actually sat. The question was not merely procedural. For thousands of active and retired Nevada officers and firefighters, the answer would determine whether a department could defeat a presumption claim simply by pointing to a gap in the medical record.

On April 20, 2023, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled 6-0 in favor of Holland. The court held that once an employee establishes the basic statutory requirements for the presumption, the employer bears the burden of proving an affirmative defense. To defeat the presumption on predisposing-condition grounds, the employer must demonstrate four things: that a predisposing condition exists, that a physician ordered the employee in writing to correct it, that the employee failed to correct it, and critically, that correcting the condition was actually within the employee's ability. LVMPD had not put on evidence establishing that last element.

The court's opinion, 139 Nev. Adv. Op. 10, was published and therefore binding across Nevada. Anderson described the ruling's policy foundation: departments rely on first responders to run into burning buildings and chase armed suspects, and the legislature built the presumption to honor that exposure. Shifting the burden back onto an employer that seeks to defeat it, the court held, matches the statute's plain structure.

The decision changed how workers' compensation carriers and self-insured government employers defend heart and lung claims statewide, requiring them to assemble affirmative evidence of ability to correct before a presumption can be rebutted.