Workers’ Compensation
I am Greg Coffey of Friedman Law Offices in Lincoln, Nebraska. Thanks for visiting our blog. Among the many questions we often get asked by people who have been injured on the job is whether they need a lawyer to represent them and that’s a fair question.
The answer is oftentimes “yes” but not always. In my experience, people hire lawyers in workers’ compensation cases for basically one of two reasons. The first reason is if the insurance company has denied all or an important part of your claim. If you have filed your claim and asked them to pay it and they say “no”, then you are left with the choice of either taking no for an answer or hiring a lawyer. That is an easy decision. The next one is slightly more complicated. Some people feel like they can handle dealing with claims on their own and other people do not. If you haven’t been through this process before, haven’t been hurt on the job before, you may not feel like you know your way around well enough to go up against an insurance adjuster who does this for a living. I sometimes compare this decision to wanting to build a new deck on the back of your house.
Some people feel like they can do it on their own and save themselves the cost of paying somebody else to do it for them. Other people, like me, would say I don’t have the skills to do it, it will take me a whole lot more time to build my own deck than if I hire it done, it is going to take up all my weekends for a month or more and in the end, I might not be satisfied with the results if I try to build the deck on my own and so I’d rather just hire somebody to do it for me. If you are not in the position where your claim has been denied, then you have to make the decision as to whether you think this is like the deck that you can build for yourself. If you feel like the insurance company and your employer have been treating you fairly and there is no question that your injury happened at work, you might not need to hire a lawyer.
If you have any questions, call Friedman Law Offices at 800-876-1093. There is never a charge to find out if we can help you (find out if you have a case). Feel free to leave a comment here on our blog, and use the share button if you know someone who might benefit from this information. Thanks for logging in.