To me, the worst thing a lawyer can do is focus on what’s best for them over what is best for their clients. In almost every case that means they worry about money and how they can get more even if it’s not the best thing for the injured worker. The most common way this happens in Illinois workers comp law is when your attorney insists you see a certain doctor. They do that because the doctor refers them clients and they want to scratch each others backs.
But this terrible behavior happens in other ways. I came across one example recently and man did this attorney screw their seriously injured client over.
In this case, a worker sustained a major back injury in 2022. They were referred to a lawyer who used to represent injured workers at a firm whose focus was on injury cases. That lawyer wasn’t in that job in 2022, but instead had joined a large corporate law firm that focuses on things like representing local governments, commercial litigation and defending insurance companies in major lawsuits.
In other words, the attorney’s practice is no longer focused on helping people, but instead on helping big companies and cities. Those clients would be pissed if they knew that their attorney was handling injury cases, so the lawyer did something awful. Or more accurately they didn’t do anything.
By that I mean that when they were hired in 2022, they didn’t file the case with the Illinois Workers’ Compensation Commission. That’s the first step in every case and important to do. The reason you do it is it assigns you to an Arbitrator which gives you an outlet to solving a problem if one develops. It also moves your case farther along if you need a trial to get a settlement. And it formally notifies the insurance company that you have representation that is looking out for you.
Instead this attorney tried to do this case on the side. They did make calls to the insurance company, but when an IME cut off the medical benefits, they didn’t do anything for many months. That is despicable! It is their job to file the right trial motions in situations like this. Of course you can’t file a trial motion if the case itself hasn’t even been filed.
It’s for this reason I strongly recommend that you Google your lawyer before hiring them and see what they are telling the world about their legal practice. If it doesn’t say work comp is their main focus, you should not hire them. Had this injured worker done so, they would have seen an attorney who mainly deals with securities issues before the SEC and commercial litigation. They might know how to handle a work comp case given their prior experience, but it hasn’t been something they regularly handle for almost four years!
When they got the call to handle this case, the attorney should have either declined or referred this worker to someone else. While fortunately the case is still salvageable, this worker has suffered and had their case delayed for no reason other than their attorney was looking out for themselves. I honestly don’t know how these attorneys live with themselves or justify their actions.
