Most people assume getting hurt on the job leads to a straightforward process. You report the injury, workers’ compensation covers your medical bills and a portion of your lost wages, and you recover.
Sometimes it works close to this way. Often it does not.
Over the years I have represented workers who discovered their injury involved two separate failures rather than one. The first came from an employer, a contractor, or a piece of equipment which should have been maintained, or a safety protocol left ignored. The second came later, when an insurance company handling the claim treated a legitimate injury as a problem to minimize rather than a person to support.
Workers’ compensation exists to provide a faster, more predictable path to recovery without needing to prove fault in court. In exchange for this speed, workers give up the right to sue their employer directly in most situations. The tradeoff makes sense in theory.
In practice, the system does not always protect the people it was built for.
I have seen adjusters delay approval for basic treatment, request repeated documentation for injuries already well supported by medical records, or push injured workers back to their jobs before a doctor believed they were ready. Each delay adds financial pressure at the exact moment someone least affords it, and financial pressure has a way of convincing people to accept less than they need.
What often gets missed is this: workers’ compensation is not always the end of the story. When a third party, someone other than the employer, contributed to an injury, a separate claim might exist alongside the workers’ compensation case. A delivery driver hurt by a defective vehicle part. A warehouse worker injured because a contractor left a hazard unaddressed. A worker struck by another company’s equipment on a shared job site.
These cases require looking past the workers’ compensation claim to ask a second question: who else bears responsibility here.
I have also represented workers whose insurance company crossed a different line altogether, denying a valid claim without a reasonable basis, dragging out an investigation well past what the facts required, or offering a settlement far below what the medical evidence supported. When an insurer’s conduct crosses from cautious into unreasonable, this becomes a bad faith issue, a separate legal claim from the underlying injury itself.
I bring these cases because I have watched what happens to a family when both failures stack on top of each other. A father unable to return to physical work waiting months for an approval which should have taken weeks. A mother facing a mortgage payment while an adjuster requests the same paperwork for a third time. These are not abstract policy disputes. They are people whose lives sit on hold while a company decides how much it wants to pay.
My approach starts with a full review, not only of the injury and the initial claim, but of every party involved and every decision the insurance company made along the way. Sometimes this review turns up nothing beyond the workers’ compensation claim already filed. Other times it uncovers a second and third path toward recovery the worker never knew existed.
Workers deserve a process which treats an injury as real the first time it is reported, not after months of resistance. Until this becomes the norm across the industry, I intend to keep pushing back on both fronts, the employer’s responsibility and the insurer’s conduct, for every worker who walks into my office believing the system already failed them once.
I tell injured workers the same thing early in every case. Document everything, even the details seeming small at the time. A conversation with a supervisor about safety concerns raised before the injury. A photo of the equipment or condition involved. A note about which coworkers witnessed what happened. Workers’ compensation claims and third party claims both rely on the same foundation, and a worker who assumes the system will fill in the gaps later often finds those gaps working against them instead.
The workers I represent did not choose to be hurt, and they should not have to fight twice to be believed. This belief drives how I build every case, from the first phone call through whatever combination of workers’ compensation, third party liability, and bad faith claims the facts support.
Author Bio
Ashley Aframian is the founder and lead attorney of Highway Law Group, a Los Angeles personal injury, employment law, and insurance bad faith firm dedicated to helping accident victims and workers hurt on the job move through the legal system with confidence and compassion. Ashley built her practice around giving injured people direct, personal attention through what is often the hardest stretch of their lives, handling the insurance companies and the legal process so her clients are free to focus on healing. Learn more at HighwayLawGroup.com.
