By Dexter J. Evans
You were just injured at work. You are driving, on your way to deliver parts for your employer when you are rear-ended by another motorist. Or you slipped and fell on a puddle of soda that has emanated from the Coca Cola machine in your company lunchroom. Perhaps paper became jammed in the brand new printing press and your hand got caught in it as you were trying to remove it. In each of these situations you have suffered an injury. The next question is: what potential claim or claims do I have?
You report the injury to your supervisor, receive initial treatment, and have done everything you need to do to at the start of your case in order to preserve your rights for workers' compensation. What have you missed? Under certain circumstances, there may be what is called a "third-party" aspect to your injury. In other words, you may not have only suffered a "work injury," but also what is commonly referred to as a "personal injury."
What is the difference? For one thing, while you have rights to worker's compensation from your employer for a work injury, you cannot file a lawsuit against your employer under civil law. Your exclusive remedy against your employer (or fellow employees) for a work injury is by way of workers' compensation.
Whether you have a personal injury case largely depends upon whether there is some party, separate and apart from your employer and fellow employees, that was responsible for your injury. For example, if you are involved in a car accident while you are on the job, you would have a personal injury claim against the person who caused the accident. If you are delivering products to a customer and slip and fall at their premises, you would have a possible personal injury claim against the customer. If you are operating a machine at work and some defect in the machine causes you to be injured, you would have a possible products liability claim against the manufacturer of the machine. These are just a few of the many scenarios that could give rise to a personal injury case for your work injury.
It is important to note the differences between worker's compensation cases and personal injury cases as well. For instance, while you cannot obtain damages for pain and suffering under workers' compensation law, personal injury law provides such relief. If you are injured at work and the injury arises out of and in the course of your employment, you have an actionable workers' compensation claim. Under personal injury law, on the other hand, in addition to your injury you must establish that the third party was negligent and that their negligence caused your injury. While you have 3 years to file a worker's compensation claim under Illinois law, for personal injury cases, you only have 2. Depending on the difficulty of proving negligence in a particular case, you may need experts to prove your personal injury case.
Personal injury cases also require investigation that goes well beyond what you would need to know in order to maintain a workers' compensation claim. In motor vehicle accident cases, you must identify the proper defendant and insurance company in order to pursue a case for personal injury. If the driver that hit you does not have insurance, you will need to look to other avenues of insurance such as your own policy which may contain uninsured coverage, or even that of the people that you reside with. In some instances, the person that caused a car accident will not have enough insurance to compensate you for your injuries. In those cases, you will have to look to your own underinsured motorist coverage to compensate you for your injuries. Often, people do not even know they have such insurance coverage.
In slip and fall cases, exposure cases, and products liability cases, the initial difficulty is in identifying the proper defendant. At times, title searches and Freedom of Information Act requests will need to be conducted in order to ensure you have captured all persons or entities responsible for your injury. In products liability cases specifically, there are time limitations above and beyond the normal statue of limitations that limit when you can bring an action for personal injury.
Getting back to our examples above, each scenario contains both a workers' compensation and personal injury aspect to the injury suffered. In the car accident example, the personal injury claim would be against the driver that impacted your vehicle. You may also have an underinsured motorist claim against both your own personal insurance car insurance and that of your employer. In the Coca-Cola machine example, your third party personal injury claim would be against the owner and operator of the vending machine. Finally, a claim for the printing press injury would be brought against the manufacturer of the machine.
These are just a few of the ways in which an injury claim can have both of a workers' compensation and personal injury component. It is always a good idea to contact an attorney to discuss your case to find out what options you have and to make sure you have someone with the requisite knowledge of the idiosyncrasies that exist between claims relating to both workers' compensation and personal injury.
Contributing author Dexter J. Evans is a lawyer with Woodruff Johnson & Palermo Injury Law Offices
