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When you are injured or become ill because of workplace conditions, filing a workers’ compensation claim so that your medical expenses are paid and you receive fair income compensation should be simple. Shouldn’t it? Unfortunately, that is not often the case.

Over the years, or for any reasonable period, you’ve diligently done what’s right for your employer, dedicating yourself to maximum effort and loyalty. And there’s no doubt, you want to work. Though your goal hasn’t been to make a million dollars, you want to fairly earn an honest dollar.

Your work ethic is solid, and you feel bad that you can’t carry on as you have since you began your work career. While enduring medical problems, you may be worried about how your job-related disability will affect your ability to earn an income in the future. If you have a family who depends on you to provide for them, your worries may be even more overwhelming. The medical or psychological issues caused by your workplace injury have significantly impacted your ability to carry out your job responsibilities as before.

When you’ve been hurt on the job in a Nevada workplace, you have legal rights to monetary compensation, medical care, and other benefits

Fortunately, Nevada law protects employees who’ve been injured or made ill because of workplace accidents and conditions. If your workplace is responsible for your injury or illness including psychiatric or psychological impairment, your employer must pay for your medical treatment, temporary disability benefits, supplemental job displacement benefits, vocational rehabilitation, a return-to-work supplement, and, if a loved one was killed because of workplace conditions, death benefits.

If you need to file a workers' compensation claim, the process is complex, the forms are confusing, and filing deadlines are strict and inflexible. As a working person whose income is critical to your economic survival, you can’t afford to lose your workers’ compensation claim.

In Nevada, it is illegal to fire or retaliate against an employee for filing a work-related injury or illness claim.  The experienced attorneys at Rini Law are highly qualified to fight for your rights, just compensation, and job return if you’ve been discriminated against by your employer after you filed your injury claim.

While you have every right to go it alone, you may already have too much to focus on when you’re dealing with a work-related injury or illness. What’s more, your chance of winning a fair and just workers’ compensation claim may be substantially enhanced when you’re represented by a skilled, extremely knowledgeable workers’ compensation attorney.

No upfront cost for injured workers

The forms that need to be filled out and the time restrictions on filing them can be overwhelming. If you miss a deadline, you may never be able to recover your just workers’ compensation benefits.

Should you handle your workers’ compensation claim on your own? It’s important to know that the process is complicated, and time-restrictions could cause you to permanently be denied benefits.

If you handle your injury or illness claim without an attorney, here’s what you must do:

• Report your workplace injury or known illness to your employer within 7 days of experiencing or discovering an injury or work-related illness.  Even though you have 7 days to report your injury, claims are often denied when the injured worker delays reporting their injury even one day.

• Correctly and properly file a workers’ compensation claim form, which is known as a Form C-4.  When you fill in the claims’ form, you should only fill in the employee section.

• If your employer doesn’t give you the claim form, you should still protect your rights by filling it out on your own by downloading it from the Nevada Workers' Compensation website, or you may be given a chance to fill it out at your first medical visit.

After you’ve completed your claim, the following should happen:

• Your employer is then required by law to fill out additional forms.

• During this process, your employer must has 30 days to either accept or deny your claim.  In the meantime, they may authorize your necessary medical treatment and allow you to see an appropriate physician and provide you with time off to do so.

What will likely follow your claim is that your employer’s workers’ compensation insurance coverage carrier and their attorneys will investigate your benefit’s eligibility or work to deny your claim. Such an investigation may require documentation of your payroll history and personnel file. During the investigation, they may speak to your supervisor, co-workers, and any other witnesses to validate your claim.

It’s important that you cooperate with their investigation. But what you say to them and what that cooperation entails could make the difference between winning your workers’ compensation claim or not.

Call 702-996-7170 to schedule a free consultation today

As if you don’t already have enough to handle when you’ve been hurt or injured on the job, if you say the wrong thing to a workers’ compensation insurance investigator you may permanently lose your right to benefits and will be left alone to deal with the economic and medical disasters that ensue.

What you say or any evidence you provide without the competent assistance of a workers’ compensation attorney may compromise your claim. It’s not that you won’t cooperate in good faith with insurance adjusters and carrier attorneys or be honest about what happened, but unscrupulous workers’ compensation insurance companies and their attorneys may subject you to questions and requests to gain evidence to deny your claim.

When you’ve followed the process for filing a workers’ compensation claim, but it is denied, you’ll have to proceed through a further complex process of filing an appeal with the hearing's office of the Department of Administration. Then, all appeal documents must be properly served. 

As for the forms and documents required to file a claim, they may not make sense or may include language that is unfamiliar to you. If you’ve already started the claims process, you may have encountered dozens of unfamiliar terms and acronyms without explanation such as PPD (permanent partial disability), TTD (temporary total disability), TPD (temporary partial disability), HO (hearing office), AO (appeals office), VR (vocational rehabilitation, and many more.

For more than 15 years, the attorneys at Rini Law have had substantial success winning monetary compensation for Nevada's injured workers because of their passionate dedication to fighting for what is right.  Our attorneys will strategically and diligently ensure your claim is properly reported and filed on time to maximize your successful claim while relieving you of the stress and worries of handling it by yourself.

When you’ve been out of work, what you don’t need is another bill. If Nevada Accident Lawyers take on your case, you’ll never pay a penny up front because we work on a contingency basis. That means, we only gets paid a percentage of your total financial settlement.

How you should fill out forms, what you report, evidence you should provide, or cooperation you give may be effectively guided by a skilled, knowledgeable workers’ compensation attorney so you don’t lose your legal and just benefits.

If you are faced with filing a workers’ compensation claim in Las Vegas or Henderson and it seems like a bigger task than you imagined, you may wonder if you should now seek legal representation.