When someone has a potentially disabling workplace injury, there’s a difficult labyrinth of legal issues to navigate. Most people soon learn that following a workplace injury, there is typically workers’ compensation coverage available to pay for medical bills and some percentage of lost wages. However, right from the start, things get complicated. How much are you entitled to? How do the medical bills get processed, and what about co-payments and medications? The answers to these questions are often unique to your particular situation.
If your injury is permanently disabling, meaning that you are disabled from any type of gainful employment due to your injuries, you may be eligible for Social Security Disability Insurance, or SSDI. Often times people do not realize that SSDI is available until their doctor suggests it. However, if you are receiving workers’ compensation benefits, any SSDI benefits you are entitled to are typically offset by the amount of your workers’ compensation benefits. There are strategies that a good workers compensation attorney can use to reduce this offset and maximize your potential benefits, but these strategies vary from case to case.
If your injury occurred at work but was caused by someone other than your employer, you might also have a third-party liability case. In these situations, any recovery on the third party case is subject to a lien from the workers’ compensation case. This means that you have to pay back the workers’ compensation carrier for any benefits it has paid to you or on your behalf out of the proceeds of your third-party case. In this situation, too, there are strategies that a good liability attorney can use to maximize your recovery.
As you can see, a single, catastrophic workplace injury can give rise to at least three different cases. Each case has its own rules, legal standards, and even its own court system. At Keches Law Group we handle all these cases and work to ensure that each case is handled to maximize the recovery for the client. If you find yourself in the unfortunate situation of a workplace injury, do not hesitate to call for a free consultation.
