Court rejects compo for woman who hurt hip after 'excessive socialising'

A woman who slipped and fell after a night of champagne, wine and cocktails on a work trip has failed again in her bid for compensation from Telstra.

Danielle Dring was attending a series of IT workshops for Telstra, where she was a senior project manager.

She met up with a friend and they shared a bottle of champagne in her Novotel on Collins hotel room in Melbourne, a bottle of wine over dinner and then went out to a cocktail bar.

Ms Dring returned to the hotel about 2.30am on the Wednesday in April 2016 and slipped on wet tiles, injuring her hip.

She tried for compensation from Telstra, arguing she had been injured at work, but the company refused.

That refusal was supported by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in 2017 and another appeal to the Federal Court has now been rejected.

The court found there was no connection between the fall and her work.

Judge John Snaden described Ms Dring's drinking on the night of the incident as the elephant in the room.

"Ms Dring was, of course, perfectly entitled to spend her evening in the way that she did," he said.

But he said because the injury had happened after "extensive socialising" when she was expected to attend a work conference in the morning, the injury "lacked a connection with her employment".

AAP