Takeaway: Workers’ compensation laws involve a trade-off: In exchange for insuring employee compensation for all workplace injuries and accidents, the laws bar most employee injury lawsuits. This bar may even prevent employees from suing employers for intentional injuries.

Workers’ compensation barred a so-called tort claim over an active shooter drill, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled.

In May 2022, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Omaha employed the plaintiff. According to the plaintiff, Catholic Charities’ executive director, chief of operations and chief of community engagement planned and carried out an active shooter drill one morning at the office where she worked. The plaintiff had no advance notice that a drill was taking place.

Instead, that morning the plaintiff heard loud bangs on her office door and was urged by the chief of community engagement to leave her office. When the plaintiff followed others toward the exits, the executive director told her a shooting was taking place.

The plaintiff later heard gunshots and saw a fellow employee lying outside on the ground, apparently dead or mortally wounded, and with what appeared to be blood on her hand. The plaintiff ran away from the building and toward a nearby shopping plaza. While running away from the building, she jumped off a retaining wall and jarred her back upon landing.

The plaintiff alleged that the chief of operations later told her son that it was all playacting and a safety drill and that...

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