Hi, I’m Cincinnati attorney Anthony Castelli.  I’m a personal injury trial attorney.  Today’s message is what I call the workers’ compensation trap.

And where that trap comes in is if you are injured at work but you are injured by a third party unrelated to your employer.  For instance, let’s say you’re a delivery truck driver for Federal Express and while you’re making a delivery, you are rear-ended by a negligent driver.  Well, you have a workers’ compensation claim, because you were hurt in the course and scope of your employment and you can get workers’ compensation benefits.  And you also have a personal injury claim against the person who caused the accident, and that claim is going to include pain and suffering and loss of enjoyment of life.  

The trap happens, and there was a recent case in the Court of Appeals in Ohio, when your workers’ compensation attorney files your claim and the Bureau of Workers’ Compensation makes the determination that your claim is not allowed.  Say you're trying to get a herniated disc allowed in your claim and the claim is denied and then your workers’ compensation attorney does not appeal that case all the way into court.  What happened in a patellar case was the court said, “Well, you cannot come back now in your automobile accident case and claim that you were hurt to the extent of having a herniated disc, because you’ve already litigated that with the Bureau of Workers’ Compensation.’

So how do you avoid that trap?  Well, I think it’s important for you to have an attorney that knows both the workers’ compensation system and the personal system and can handle both of those cases, and they know, specifically, that if there is a condition that gets denied in your workers’ compensation case, they continue to appeal that all the way through court.  And this may take quite some time, but at least it keeps that issue alive and then, conceivably, you could even join both of those issues in one lawsuit.

So that's what I call the workers’ compensation trap.  If you have any questions about that, feel free to give me a call, 621-2345.  I’d be glad to talk to you.

So thank you very much for listening today.