We are Illinois work injury lawyers who will talk to you for free at any time. Fill out the form to the right or call us at (312) 346-5578. Our blog discusses real life scenarios with the hopes of helping injured workers.
This one is a doozy.
There is a law that says if you are hurt in Illinois, hired in Illinois or primarily work out of Illinois, you can bring your case here. That’s a good thing for you if we can because Illinois has in my opinion the best benefits in the country for injured workers although our current Governor is putting them at risk.
You need one of those three things. So if you were hired in Illinois, but transferred with your company to another state, you can bring your case here. If you mainly work out of IL, but were hurt elsewhere, you can bring your case here.
When a potential client comes to us, it’s our job to tell them if we can help or not. A work comp attorney in Chicago viewed their primary job as to try and make money and ended up hurting their client.
Long story short is the injured worker is a truck driver out of another state, but lives here. That is their only contact with Illinois. They got hurt in another Georgia and were hired in Georgia. That is where their home terminal is.
There is no way to bring this case in to Illinois, but this crummy lawyer tried to do so. The result was the client had his back surgery delayed by over six months when a lawyer in Georgia could have solved the problem right away. According to the caller, it wasn’t until the insurance company said that they’d approve the surgery if the fraudulent Illinois case was dropped that things turned around.
We operate with one major rule. We are honest. To a fault. Some people don’t like it. But honesty is the best policy.
If this other attorney operated the same way, the client would have had his surgery a long time ago and might be healed and back to work by now. Instead this lawyer was hoping to make a buck with a Hail Mary and ended up hurting the client.
I would never discourage anyone from bringing a case in Illinois if they can. But I would also never tell you to pursue a case when you don’t have one. It’s not in my best interests. It’s not in your best interests and it’s bad for the system as a whole.
Bottom line for you is if you don’t think you meet one of the three conditions described above, ask your lawyer how you’ll win your case in Illinois. If they can’t answer then either they don’t know what they are doing or there is no case at all.
