How are personal injury and workers’ compensation claims different?

The question is how workers’ compensation differs from another type of personal injury claim, and the answer is in almost every way. First of all, other types of personal injury go before the traditional court system—the judge in the black robe, like you see on TV. Workers’ compensation isn’t like that. There is no jury. There is no judge in a black robe. They have administrative law judges, but it’s a different court system than the traditional court system.

Second, one thing people don’t realize about workers’ compensation is that liability almost never matters. The entire idea of workers’ comp is that employers and employees sort of agree to a different system where liability doesn’t matter as much as the fact that you were hurt on the job in most cases. On the other side of that, the employee gets less damages than they would in a traditional personal injury case.

When it comes to the “less damages” part of it, another major difference is that in traditional personal injury cases, you get paid for your medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering, and all of those things are wrapped into one big settlement. In workers’ compensation, the settlements are much smaller at the end because, yes, workers’ comp pays for the medical bills, but they do that directly to the providers, so it doesn’t come as part of a settlement. Two, they only have to pay two-thirds of your lost wages, not all of your lost wages, and those two-thirds are typically paid out every other week or every week. So you’ve gotten that as you go, and it’s not a part of a settlement at the end.

The settlement at the end of a workers’ compensation claim is mostly permanent partial disability or permanent total disability, which are terms that basically mean what impairment you have after the doctors have gotten you back to be as good as they can get you. Maybe not all the way from before the injury, but as good as medicine can make you. What’s left is what your settlement in workers’ comp is. It is ordinarily much smaller than what you would see in a similar settlement in a personal injury case.

There are many, many other differences. I taught workers’ compensation to law students for years, and I can fill an entire course with the differences. But you’ve got to think of it as a system where liability usually isn’t what matters—you just have to be on the job. Your damages are going to be completely different from what you’ve heard of on TV before, so you can throw what you think you know about damages out the window.

You have got to make sure that you go into this while giving good notice to your employer and talking to your doctors about what your job duties are so that they can advise the employer and the workers’ compensation carrier through the medical records about whether you can even go back to work.