Published by J.A. Davis & Associates – San Antonio Personal Injury Lawyers – Workers’ Compensation

Workers’ Comp: Preparing Your Case For Court

Once you’ve clearly determined your employer actually is a non-subscriber, you can start to prepare your case. In order to file and pursue your non-subscriber personal injury case in court, your situation should contain the following three important elements:

A solvent defendant
Liability
Damages

A Solvent Defendant

It’s only natural when you’ve been injured, to want to pursue the party who caused your injury, and then to pursue compensation from them. But if that party has few or no assets, there is really no logic in filing a case against them in court, because it will cost you more in court and filing fees than in a settlement or damages awarded from that entity. So in spite of being entitled to compensation, it’s very possible you won’t receive any, just because the other party has no assets to compensate you for your claims. If the defendant has no financial means (income, insurance, or assets) to pay you for your claims, filing a case against them is a waste of time and money. Regardless of their guilt, unfortunately, as the saying goes, “You can’t squeeze blood from a stone.” Published by J.A. Davis & Associates – San Antonio Personal Injury Lawyers – Workers’ Compensation

It’s also a natural tendency for a party who has injured another person or damaged their property, to make efforts to hide their assets or lie about insurance in order to protect them from being taken as compensation to the injured party. So usually, it’s best not to assume the injuring party has no assets, simply because they may appear to be hurting financially. Neither should you automatically accept your employer’s claims they do not have money or insurance. Remember, it’s a natural tendency for employers to hide and protect their assets if they think they can get away with the deception. Most of the time, it’s not their intent to injure—the injury was simply bad luck for you and for them as well. It may seem unfair or unjust to them to have to give their hard-earned assets to you as compensation, regardless of how badly they accidentally injured you.

However, if the injury was intentional, you can be sure they certainly had no intention of compensating you. This is where a non-subscriber work injury attorney can be invaluable to you. Your attorney will know where to look to uncover the defendant’s hidden, undisclosed assets, and insurance. In addition, there may be other third parties partly responsible for your injuries, including equipment manufacturers, and contractors or property owners at unsafe worksites. Your attorney can review your case with you in consultation and help clarify all the liable defendants in your case and design an appropriate strategy.

Liability
When injured, Texas law requires that you prove the defendant is liable for and owes compensation to you for injuries incurred. To do this, you must show they caused your injury and were responsible for it. In other words, you have to prove the defendant owed you a duty, and then violated or breached that duty to you, and this was the cause of your injury. Duty can take many forms. Generally, duty is simply taking reasonable care in the course of actions so that no one is harmed by either party’s actions or inaction. The injuring party breaches their duty when they do not take proper, reasonable care to prevent injury or harm. This is true both in the workplace as well as on the street.

Typically, based on the severity of the breach of duty owed to you, liability is divided into three categories. Simple negligence is the most common form of liability. This is the standard of negligence you will be required to prove under non-subscriber injury law. Essentially, negligence is careless or reckless behavior that results in an injury and is most commonly called an “accident”. For example, if a coworker, playing around, carelessly swings a broom, loses his grip, and breaks your arm, this is negligent. He should have used more reasonable care with the cleaning tool so that no one was injured.

Gross negligence is the next category of liability and is characterized by someone engaging in behavior they know or realize is reckless and dangerous, or disregards an obvious danger any reasonable person would know could cause injury. For instance, if your boss tells you to climb a ladder he knows is unstable, dangerous, or defective and you fall and break your leg, he would be guilty of gross negligence.

The third category of liability is wanton and willful behavior and usually results in punitive damages. This is when the other party intentionally causes you injury and deliberately sets out to harm you in some way. For example, if a vengeful “ex-boyfriend” stalks you and deliberately tries to kill you or a neighbor angry over your Great Dane using his yard as a pasture, intentionally assaults you, they are wantonly and willfully liable. It’s to your advantage to engage an experienced non-subscriber work injury, personal injury attorney to help separate the facts from the emotions and build the strongest case possible. our Law Office has handled thousands of non-subscriber work injury cases, understands all levels of liability, and can help in determining how legitimate a case you have. They can help pinpoint where the acts that caused your injury to fall on the liability scale.

An experienced non-subscriber work injury lawyer can assist you in sorting out the sequence of events leading up to your injury and separate the facts from the emotional elements of the case. That way, the court hears clearly exactly what happened and who caused what. You could easily get sidetracked in the emotional volleyball of “he said/she said” with the defending parties unless you have skilled attorneys advocating your rights. Although the parties at fault, the duties breached, and compensation you are entitled to in your personal injury case may seem crystal clear to you, in court, these issues often become murky, especially when argued against by savvy defense attorneys. In fact, it is the goal or intention of the opposing party attorney to make sure these issues become muddied. That is why you need an experienced lawyer on your side to clear up all the issues.

Damages
Initially, you have to prove you actually have damages, i.e. financial losses you’ve incurred because of your injury. This may strike you as totally obvious, but often it is overlooked in the rush to obtain compensation for an inconvenient, bothersome, or seriously annoying incident.

For instance, imagine you’re in a department store on a hurried errand after work in downtown , and another shopper accidentally bumps a giant stacked display of Barbie Dolls and hundreds of boxed Barbies fall on you and your cart. It takes a while to dig yourself out, right your cart, retrieve you spilled items, and continue. This causes you much frustration and anger, but you don’t have even a slight bruise, and the mishap doesn’t even make you late for work. Nothing was damaged when it fell out of your cart. You may want to get even with the careless shopper who buried you in Barbie Dolls, or the employee who built the ill-advised display, but you have no actual damages, and therefore, you have no case. You simply have the beginnings of a bad day.

Our attorneys have won hundreds of work injury cases, so call us today to discuss the specifics of your case and to answer your questions.