Do You Need A Lawyer For Your Workers’ Comp Claim?
Do You Need A Lawyer For Your Workers’ Comp Claim?
Ty Wilson is a Georgia workers’ compensation lawyer. He gets this question very often because when you are injured at work, it’s common for others to tell you to work it out with your employer. However, there is more to consider. You really need to consider your injury.
If you have a very minor injury, you really don’t need an attorney. You need to focus on getting the care you need to get back to work. You’re going to make more money staying at work and remaining gainfully employed and dealing with the minor injury and letting the employer and the insurance company pay for the injuries if they’re mild.
However, if your injury is one of a serious nature, where you need surgery or may need surgery, the bigger question is, are you going to be able to physically return back to work? If you will be able to return to work, will you be able to do your job the way you could before the accident? How will that affect your employment in the long run. These questions will warrant the need of a skilled and experienced attorney to navigate the issues.
The main reason that you will want to hire an attorney is not necessarily for those reasons up front. It’s for the background plans that you may not have considered. Insurance companies spend a lot of money on case managers, for example. These case managers are tasked with reaching out to the doctor and providing adequate notice to you about meetings with the doctor. This often falls through the cracks and can affect your case. Here is a scenario and how it can affect you.
Let’s say you are out with an injury that requires surgery for your arm. The case manager (nurse) is reaching out to the doctor. When you’re not around, she should provide you notice ten days before they’re going to meet with the doctor and invite you as the patient to be there. However, she did not do that. (They typically don’t). She worked with the doctor to get you released back to work. Now, that doesn’t really sound like a bad thing because you want to return to your job. In fact, that’s exactly what she tells the doctor. She says “Doctor Smith, he is ready to get back to his job as soon as he can. Doc, do you think he can get back to work doing light duty, maybe something sitting at a desk?” However, your job doesn’t involve a desk and it never has. That means the employer will need to create a desk job for you. What they are really doing is stopping the insurance company from paying you and shifting it back to the employer. The issue here is that how long do you think your employer is going to keep that desk job for you when it never existed? What if you need that for a year? What if you can never return to your old job?
The bottom line is that this all depends on specifics. The specifics of your injury, your job, your recovery and you. Without legal representation, the insurance company will guide you the way they want to because they are looking out for themselves. It’s really that simple. A lawyer looks at the entire picture when you are injured on the job to determine if you need a lawyer for your workers’ comp claim. Some injuries do not need a skilled attorney. It is in your best interest to get care and go back to work as quickly as possible. However, some are quite the opposite.
If you have been injured at work, contact Ty. He has years of experience working with a wide variety of work related injuries and knows what to do for your injuries. He offers a free consultation. Visit our Contact page for more information.
