#128 - Georgia Workers' Compensation Attorney - How To Start Your WC Claim.

Hello, this is Ty Wilson, and I wanted to say thank you for listening today.  Let's get straight to it.  We get a lot of questions about Georgia workers' compensation claims, and one of the first ones is usually when someone gets hurt, the first question they have is how do I get help?  How do I start this whole process?  And so the first thing you should do, probably one of the more important things you should do is you need to notify your supervisor.  We have a lot of people who contact us that say yeah, I don't know if the injury's serious and I don't necessarily want to get workers' comp involved because I'm hurting, but at the same time, I don't want to lose my job and so forth.  Well, these are things you definitely want to think about.  If your injury is minor, you may want to go get the care yourself, but you're going to have to pay for that care, and if you're willing to do that, well then you don't file a workers' comp and after 30 days you haven't provided legal notice, and your claim will be denied.  The more important thing is if you're injured to the point where you cannot do your job, it's causing you a great deal of pain, what is critical at that point is that you notify your supervisor and/or boss, preferably in writing, that you've been injured – and you want to tell them also – but you've been injured, you're hurt on the job, and more importantly, you need medical care for your injuries.  A lot of these employers will do the right thing and say, hey, here's our panel.  This is a list of doctors.  Select one of them and schedule you an appointment and on you go and they get a report and so forth.  We do have a set of employers, though, that are not as kind about it, and they say we don't believe you're hurt.  We don't think you got hurt on the job, and they just kind of push you away, or they terminate you would be the absolutely worst-case scenario.  Certainly, if they terminate you, you're not worried about losing your job.  However, what's critical is that you do reach out to them, that you ask them for medical care as it relates to your injury, and get checked out and make sure that your injury is not one that is going to prevent you from working because being afraid of losing your job with a company that you may never be able to return back to work with because of your injury is a little silly.  If you can't return back to work, they're probably going to terminate you anyway.  And the reality is if you've got a serious bodily injury from an on‑the‑job accident, it is critical that you get the medical care paid for so that you can get and return to some form of work in the future.  It will bankrupt you if you try to pay it out of your own income just from the fact that if it's a serious injury requiring surgery, that can get very expensive very quickly, and that is the No. 1 reason people file for bankruptcy is the high cost of medical care.   We'll see you on the next podcast.  Thank you.  Also, we do have a series of books and special reports that we've written on workers' compensation claims, special reports for the workers' compensation claims.  If you're interested in getting those sent to you, please reach out to us via text message or telephone call at 912-233-1100.CALL US ►  912-208-2992TEXT US ► 912-233-1100EMAIL US ► [email protected] •  Website•  Facebook•  Pinterest