If You Have Symptoms, Tell Your Lawyer Immediately!

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Today’s blog post is great advice from New York friend Kate Fitzgerald. The same problems and solutions happen nationwide. Always tell your lawyer the whole truth and provide details. Sometimes a thing that a person doesn’t think is a big deal or are little details are the most important part of the conversation from a legal perspective.

If You Have Symptoms, Tell Your Lawyer

We represent a client whose hands were directly injured a few years ago. The insurance company, as part of its defense, is raising a provision in the law which requires an injured worker to file a claim for a direct injury within two years of the accident (WCL § 28). While interviewing the client, we learned that she had been feeling symptoms in her hands years ago, at the same time as she began experiencing the symptoms to other areas of her body. But because she only mentioned that her hands hurt now, we may not be able to get her the compensation she deserves.

Our client told me that originally brought up the symptoms of numbness, tingling and weakness in her hands with her doctor, but he felt these symptoms were related to her neck, another

If you are hurt, tell your attorney everything, even if you aren’t sure if it is relevant.

area where she was injured. The doctor tried to treat her hand symptoms by treating her neck first. He  planned to treat her hands directly if treating her neck did not help. The neck treatment took several years to complete, and the doctor recently concluded that my client has a direct injury to her hands and referred her to a specialist.

At this point in the case, because the doctor was treating our client’s hand symptoms as part of her neck pain, we are busy combing our client’s medical records to find evidence which proves that she complained about her hands years ago. If we can find a medical record discussing symptoms and treatment to our client’s hands, perhaps we will be able to get around the 2 year statute of limitations and get our client benefits for her hurt hands.

Lesson learned: If you are hurt, tell your attorney everything, even if you aren’t sure if it is relevant. Your lawyers can decide whether to bring up the injury at a hearing, even if only to protect your rights for the future.

Kate Fitzgerald is an attorney at Pasternack Tilker Ziegler Walsh Stanton & Romano, LLP, a full service Law Firm that has been representing the injured person and worker in New York State for over 80 years, concentrating in serious personal injury cases, workers compensation claims, occupational disease claims, social security claims and various other matters such as estate planning and state and municipal disability claims.

The offices of Rehm, Bennett, Moore & Rehm, which also sponsors the Trucker Lawyers website, are located in Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska. Five attorneys represent plaintiffs in workers’ compensation, personal injury, employment and Social Security disability claims. The firm’s lawyers have combined experience of more than 95 years of practice representing injured workers and truck drivers in Nebraska, Iowa and other states with Nebraska and Iowa jurisdiction. The lawyers regularly represent hurt truck drivers and often sue Crete Carrier Corporation, K&B Trucking, Werner Enterprises, UPS, and FedEx. Lawyers in the firm hold licenses in Nebraska and Iowa and are active in groups such as the College of Workers’ Compensation Lawyers, Workers' Injury Law & Advocacy Group (WILG), American Association for Justice (AAJ), the Nebraska Association of Trial Attorneys (NATA), and the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA). We have the knowledge, experience and toughness to win rightful compensation for people who have been injured or mistreated.

This entry was posted in Workers' Comp' Basics, Workers' Compensation.

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