We and the lawyers we work with on cases are Illinois workers’ compensation attorneys. That’ what we focus on.
If you get wrongfully fired from your job or have compensation issues, you don’t need a work comp attorney, you need a labor lawyer. BUT……. if you think you were illegally fired while on workers’ compensation, you should talk to your work comp attorney first. This is how every lawyer we know views it.
There are a couple of reasons I say that. First off, if you get let go for any reason, if you have work related restrictions from your job injury, you should immediately begin to get TTD benefits or continue to get it until you have no restrictions. There’s no limit to how long that can last. At least once a week I talk to an injured worker who got fired and should be getting TTD, but isn’t because they didn’t know their rights.
The second reason is if you are on work comp and get let go, it’s so inter related to your work comp case, that your labor law attorney (assuming you have a good case) and your work comp attorney having a good relationship can only help each respective case. Each may end up having information that can be useful in maximizing what recovery can happen for you.
As a result, if you call us looking for help, please know that we won’t do one case without the other. We say that because it’s in your best interests.
A lot of the calls we get about this come from people who have a lawyer for their work injury and have seen that we know good labor attorneys too. These calls can drive me crazy because I often hear about lazy work comp attorneys who refuse to do anything for their clients that isn’t directly part of the work comp case. I argue that it is and even though they don’t handle labor cases, if you’ve been doing this long enough you should know someone.
When an attorney refuses to help you with this, it shows that they don’t care about you. Not every wrongful termination case is actually a case. But if they won’t help you at least investigate it and talk to you about how getting fired affects your work comp claim, they are terrible at their job.
We will take over from these attorneys and when we do, we will get you help getting a proper evaluation of your rights in suing over being fired. But we won’t do one case without the other for the reasons mentioned above.
So if you are in this situation and you like your work comp attorney and think they are fighting for you, go to them for help. It’s their job. If you don’t think they are doing a good job and want to switch firms (or at least talk about it), get in touch with us and we’ll do whatever we can for you.
