Many of you know that Oxner + Permar has been a long-time champion of Kid’s Chance of North Carolina. Kid’s Chance is our local chapter of a national organization dedicated to providing scholarships to the children of injured workers. This April we’re again the lead sponsor of a fundraising golf tournament to be held at the Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro — home of the PGA’s Wyndham Championship.
Kid’s Chance is an incredible organization, and we’re proud to have donated thousands of dollars to it while helping them raise even more money from other law firms as well. If you have a student in your family, or know of a family of an injured worker who could benefit from a scholarship, please go to www.kidschancenc.org for more information.
What do you really want out of Workers’ Compensation? I’ve spoken to thousands of injured people and their families and I’ve asked most of them that question. “To get better, to be able to return to work, and to enjoy my family again.” Those are the most common answers. In over fifteen years, I’ve never had anyone tell me he wanted to beat the system or make a bunch of money.
So it is disappointing that so many insurance adjusters, human resource directors, safety managers, and politicians think that many injured workers are just doing it for the money. It’s so bad that a well-known orthopedic surgeon in Raleigh recently spoke to a group of defense attorneys and insurance adjusters and said that he believed that many injured workers would have unnecessary surgery just to avoid working and to get more money.
What scares the daylights out of me is knowing that injured workers – who know a lot more than I do about real life: driving trucks, running a knitting machine, building a house, and more – are going to see this doctor, and others like him, every day because they don’t know their rights under the workers’ compensation laws.It’s not that we’re smarter than they are. It’s simply that we study workers’ compensation all day long — and we’ve been doing this for many years now.
Protect yourself, your family, and your home. You may not need to hire an attorney but you certainly need information and someone to help you think through your case with you.
This article was written by Todd P. Oxner
Lou Waple recently won a case before the Industrial Commission that illustrates two different issues in workers’ compensation. First, the danger of company doctors. Second, the even greater danger of some attorneys….
The trouble all started when First Comp Insurance sent our client to one of their “approved” neurosurgeons. He correctly diagnosed her as having a bulging disk in her neck and eventually fused two of her vertebrae together. Then within only two months of this. he released her from his care with no restrictions at all. It didn’t matter that she was still complaining of pain, he sent her back to her old job.
It got worse when the First Comp’s attorney immediately filed a Form 24 saying that she was no longer disabled — because the company doctor had said “no restrictions.”
It all hit rock bottom when her attorney told her that there was no use fighting the Form 24 because the insurance company was right….
There is a happy ending to all this, though. She fired her first attorney who had wanted to settle her claim quick, she hired us, and Lou beat the Form 24. Then he followed that up with a win in a full hearing. As a result of that, our client is still getting her checks more than year later. Plus, she won the right to pick her own doctor for pain management.
Psssst…..! Who’s that following you?
If you’ve got Stonewood Insurance on your case, you can pretty much guarantee it’s a private investigator. Most insurance companies will use private investigators from time to time. But Stonewood uses them more than any other insurance company we’ve ever seen.
“But I’ve got nothing to hide” you say… That’s not always the issue. Here are a few tips to keep in mind about private investigators: click the link in the title above to read the full story in our Article Library.
I’d like to be able to say this didn’t happen all the time. But I cannot do that because it does. Here are the basic facts:
Does this happen every time Key Risk or other insurance companies return people to light duty work? No. But it happens a lot. And in most cases, like this one, it takes several months — and sometimes over a year — for the Industrial Commission to turn the checks back on again.
This article was written by Todd P. Oxner
