My last post was about an Illinois work comp attorney who did a terrible job in preparing their client for trial on a claim of injury from repetitive work.

On the flip side, I read a case summary of an Illinois Department of Corrections supervisor whose attorney appears to have done a tremendous job in helping her win the case.

She worked in the Bureau of Identification and part of her job was to fingerprint inmates.  She fingerprinted about 40 people a day.

The last post talked about how the case was likely lost due to the attorney not being prepared or asking enough questions about the worker’s job duties. In this case, however, I learned the following from the case summary, all of which came out in testimony:

  • Her office had a counter that measured chest high.
  • Inmates stood on the other side of her as she fingerprinted them.
  • The counter was about four and a half feet tall.
  • All individuals coming into the facility were fingerprinted.
  • It required her to use a large paper cutter with a large blade to cut the paper.
  • She would roll all ten fingers on a fingerprint card.
  • There were 14 motions in fingerprinting and that number would be doubled because each finger was rolled in ink and then on the card.
  • She also used the paper cutter to cut up old ID’s, used a hole puncher for mug shots, made ID’s, issued reports, assembled files, and took DNA samples.

That is a lot of detail, and all of it, along with her medical records, went in support of her claim that her elbow injury and carpal tunnel were caused in part by her job duties. And by the way, she also had done this over a 30 year period.

This is a great example of a law firm being very prepared and making sure that their client is as well. It’s as much detail as you’d see in any case, and it’s why she won the case.

In the last post, I talked about the fact that the injured worker hired a law firm that doesn’t focus on work comp cases. In this case, the attorney is at a well regarded Chicago law firm that mostly handles work injury cases in Illinois and has a track record of success.  I’m quite confident that if the worker had hired a bad firm, she would have lost her case.

It’s doubly impressive because the State of Illinois loves to fight work comp cases, especially ones that involve repetitive activities. So score one for the good guys, thanks to a worker who was smart enough to hire the right law firm.

We are work injury attorneys with over 20 years of experience. If you’d like to speak with a lawyer for free, call us at 312-346-5578 or fill out our contact form and we will call you.