The Kentucky Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a catering company employee who was in Las Vegas for a work conference and took a few minutes to buy souvenirs for loved ones suffered a compensable ankle injury when she fell on a staircase leaving her hotel.

Kimminee Costello was employed by Thompson Catering & Special Events as an event manager in 2014 when she was sent to attend a conference in Las Vegas, where she tripped and fell down a staircase leaving the hotel to buy presents. She required four surgeries for her ankle injury, which her company initially accepted as work-related by paying $149,419.03 in medical benefits and $30,324.92 in temporary total disability, according to Thompson Catering & Special Events v. Kimminee Costello.

In 2019, her company contested her claim before an administrative law judge, which ruled she had not suffered a compensable injury because she was not in the course and scope of her employment when she deviated from her work to buy gifts outside of the hotel. In reversing, the Workers’ Compensation Board and the Kentucky Court of Appeals ruled that the injury was compensable.

The state’s highest court affirmed, writing that the administrative law judge placed an “inordinate emphasis on the subjective purpose of Costello’s personal mission to the exclusion of other relevant factors, particularly the brevity of the deviation and the fact the injury occurred during a period of enforced hiatus” and that it was “convinced” the judge “misapplied the traveling employee exception” to the state’s workers comp comings-and-goings law that state injuries suffered while commuting are not compensable.

The court also said Ms. Costello’s “uncontested testimony was that her personal shopping excursion was meant to last ‘for a few minutes.’ Beyond her subjective intention, however, the actual duration of the deviation was even less than a few minutes because Costello was injured as she exited the premises of the hotel, and the objective of her personal mission was never fulfilled.”