Protecting the Carrier’s Workers’ Compensation Lien, Future Credit, and Medicare Compliance When the Third-Party Case Settles

Ashton T. Kirsch, Shareholder | Matthiesen, Wickert & Lehrer, S.C.

Ashton T. Kirsch is a shareholder at Matthiesen, Wickert & Lehrer, S.C. who litigates workers’ compensation subrogation alongside large loss casualty, commercial auto, and transportation and cargo cases. His listed practice areas include Workers’ Compensation Subrogation, Trucking and Downtime Claims, Health Insurance Lien Filings in Workers’ Compensation Claims, and ERISA, Medicare Advantage, and Health Insurance Subrogation. He practices from the firm’s Hartford, Wisconsin office, where he has practiced since 2015, and built and grew the firm’s commercial auto and cargo/transportation group.

• Education & Credentials

Mr. Kirsch has been designated a Certified Claims Professional by Claims Litigation Management (CLM). He was admitted to the Wisconsin bar in 2014 and to the United States District Courts for the Western and Eastern Districts of Wisconsin. He earned his J.D. at the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison, with a focus on finance and corporate litigation, and his B.A. in Political Science and History (South East Asia) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

• Recognition & Leadership

Mr. Kirsch has been named a Wisconsin Rising Star by Super Lawyers Magazine every year from 2018 through 2026 and was one of CLM’s Phenoms Under 40 in December 2022. He serves on the Legislative Affairs Committee and the Executive Advisory Committee of the National Association of Subrogation Professionals (NASP), and he is the Product Liability Committee Lead Chair, Publication/Magazine SubCommittee Co-Chair (since 2019), and Webinar Sub-Committee Co-Chair (since 2020) at CLM. He also sits on the Executive Committee of the Milwaukee Young Lawyers Association.

• Professional Involvement

Mr. Kirsch has been a member of NASP since 2016 and CLM since 2015, and belongs to several industry organizations, including the Subrogation Healthcare Alliance and Trucking Industry Defense Association. He regularly speaks on workers’ compensation subrogation and MCS-90 issues at NASP, Strafford, and myLawCLE events. He has authored articles for Claims Journal and hosts The Subrogation Support Network Podcast.

• Experience

Since 2015, Mr. Kirsch’s practice at the firm has centered on subrogation cases involving large loss casualty, commercial auto, transportation and cargo, and workers’ compensation. He has been retained by attorneys nationwide to serve as an expert and to consult and train on the MCS-90 Endorsement and the Carmack Amendment, and he has testified before legislative committees and administrative agencies on tort reform, collateral source rules, insurance mandatory minimum limits, insurance regulatory compliance, and commercial auto issues. Earlier, he was a founding partner and legal counsel of Bankmybiz.com, general counsel to a real estate development consulting group, and a judicial intern to Justice Paul Higginbotham of the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, District IV.

Mark A. Solomon, Shareholder | Matthiesen, Wickert & Lehrer, S.C.

Mark A. Solomon is a shareholder and insurance trial lawyer at Matthiesen, Wickert & Lehrer, S.C. whose practice centers on workers’ compensation subrogation, complex property and casualty subrogation, and automobile subrogation. His listed practice areas include Workers’ Compensation Subrogation, Health Insurance Lien Filings in Workers’ Compensation Claims, ERISA, Medicare Advantage, and Health Insurance Subrogation, Trucking and Downtime Claims, and MCS-90. He manages the firm’s Austin, Texas branch office and has prepared and tried cases in state and federal court.

• Education & Credentials

Mr. Solomon earned his J.D. from South Texas College of Law in Houston in 2006 and his B.A. in Political Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. He was admitted to the Texas bar in 2006, the Colorado bar in 2018, and the Georgia bar in 2021, and he is admitted to the United States District Courts for the Southern District of Texas and the District of Colorado.

• Recognition & Leadership

Mr. Solomon manages the firm’s Austin, Texas branch office and is a member of its continuing-education and subrogation training team. At Farmers Insurance Group, he became Supervising Attorney in 2016, managing a team of seven attorneys, paralegals, and collection specialists nationwide.

• Professional Involvement

Mr. Solomon is a long-time member of NASP and a member of the American Bar Association, the Texas Young Lawyers Association, and CLM. His workers’ compensation speaking includes “Advanced Concepts of Workers’ Compensation Subrogation” at NASP’s 2025 Annual Conference, “Advanced Concepts of Workers’ Compensation” at the 2025 Texas Workers’ Compensation Conference, and “The Basics of Subrogating Texas Workers’ Compensation Claims” at the same conference in 2023. He also presented “Subrogation Magic: Using MCS-90 To Make Money Appear On Trucking Losses” at NASP’s 2025 Annual Conference and “Road To Recovery: Strategies For Subrogation and Third-Party Liability” in March 2026. He is the author of Where’s The Beef? Litigating Livestock/Vehicle Collisions In All 50 States, published by Juris Publishing in 2022.

• Experience

Mr. Solomon’s subrogation practice draws on his years as a trial attorney at Farmers Insurance Group, where he litigated large loss commercial property, homeowners, and automobile liability claims and specialized in matters for the national property subrogation group. He also spent nearly ten years litigating with two Houston litigation firms, and he has conducted training and continuing-education classes for subrogation professionals at Farmers and elsewhere.

SESSION 1 – Asserting the Carrier’s Workers’ Compensation Lien and Future Credit in Third-Party Settlements | Ashton T. Kirsch & Mark A. Solomon | 12:00pm – 1:00pm

This hour follows a trucking-crash file weeks from mediation. It covers the calls carrier-side counsel must make before the third-party case settles: when to intervene rather than rely on notice, when to refuse consent, how to calculate and document the future credit, how to strike consortium-heavy allocations, and how employer-fault findings and fee deductions cut the lien, including the Texas offset question now before the Texas Supreme Court. It is built for lawyers who already assert subrogation on trucking and construction third-party matters. Attendees leave with an intervene-or-rely-on-notice decision tree, a multi-state lien and credit chart, and a written consent-refusal and credit-stipulation template.

BREAK | 1:00pm – 1:10pm

SESSION 2 – Carrier-Side Medicare Compliance When the Workers’ Compensation and Tort Cases Settle Together | Ashton T. Kirsch & Mark A. Solomon | 1:10pm – 2:10pm

This session is for carrier, self-insured employer and TPA counsel who already pursue subrogation on trucking and construction third-party files. It works one dual-settlement file from intake to funding: who reports which TPOC under the separate Section 111 penalty clocks now in force, how to fix conditional payments across two recoveries (Medicare Advantage included), and how the tort-funded future credit shapes the WCMSA and the new WCMSA reporting fields. Attendees leave with a vendor checklist, a dualsettlement timeline and a closing-language checklist for making the sequencing call when the tort case is weeks from mediation and the facts are incomplete.