If you were injured, uh, at a location that’s not your employer’s premises, then you still can qualify for, uh, workers compensation benefits. You don’t physically have to be, have been injured on the property of your employer, but it’s still very important and critical that your injuries are related in some way to your work. If you can show that your work or your employer, although not, uh, on their property, puts you in a, in a position or in a place which, um, caused you to be injured or that your work activities in some way, even though not at the employer’s premises, uh, caused your injuries, it’s no different than you having been injured, uh, at your employer’s place of business. Uh, so that’s a long way of saying the analysis is always whether your injury bears some causal relationship to your work and your work activities regardless of, you know, the place where it happened. The place where it happened can sometimes be very important, but it’s certainly not dispositive of whether you get benefits or not.

If your injury was caused by a coworker, and that’s very often the case whether through negligence or not, the injury may have happened because of a coworker’s activity. As long as you can show that the injury is due to workplace activities—whether it’s by your coworker or someone else—you’re entitled to workers compensation benefits. The fact that a coworker may have, for example, if your coworker is driving and you’re in the passenger seat on your way to a job or you’re transporting something as part of work and that coworker is negligent or drives negligently and strikes something, injuring you—in many cases all you have available to you is your rights under the Workers Compensation Act and your rights to benefits under the Workers Compensation Act because the Act prevents you from suing your employer or your coworkers.

Workers compensation benefits are not taxable, there are no taxes taken out of them, and they’re not subject to tax.

That’s a great question that a lot of people ask and most people don’t know the answer to, and the answer to that is if you are the typical workers compensation case in the majority of work injuries, the person is what we call partially disabled, and what that means essentially is you might be able to do some work activities but you can’t perform your full duties at the position you were injured in, and that’s most people, and most people are partially disabled, and the law is you can collect weekly workers compensation benefits for up to six years or 312 weeks. At that point, if you reach the six-year mark, which we call the gate, then even if you’re not better, even if you’re still not capable of going back to that position that you got hurt at, your benefits stop, and that’s for no other reason other than that’s the way the law was written. It’s another incentive built into the system to encourage you, if you can’t go back to the job you were hurt at, to find something else you can do, some other employment to get back to earning a living. So that’s the general rule—six years is how long you can collect workers comp for—but like with any general rule, there are exceptions, and the main exception to that are people that are considered totally disabled, which means not only can’t you do the job you were hurt at doing, you really can’t do any job because of your disability and your injuries, and if you’re totally disabled and on workers comp for total disability, then there is no time limit to how long you could theoretically collect your weekly check. You could collect it provided you stay totally disabled for the remainder of your natural life. Those cases are certainly not the general rule—they are exceptional cases—but we do represent workers who are catastrophically injured at work or tragically even killed in the workplace, and those types of cases are a little different. There’s a lot more considerations to work out with those, and they have different value depending on the circumstances.

If you owe child support or other certain obligations in the Family Court then yes your weekly workers compensation benefit could be subject to a Family Court or a child support or alimony lien and typically that’s the only type of lien or attachment or garnishment so to speak that we will see that you might be subject to otherwise you know workers compensation benefits are not subject to taxes or other deductions.

Generally no, again when they created the workers compensation system there was a trade off that occurred in terms of you know lowering the threshold in terms of what you have to show to qualify for workers compensation but also limiting the benefits they’re entitled to and so you don’t get your full pay or salary when you’re out of work and on workers compensation rather what you get is a percentage of that pay and in Rhode Island if you’re injured at work the law currently is you will receive 62% of your average weekly earnings and we come up with that average by looking at what you’ve made in the 13 weeks prior to your injury and also factoring in overtime and bonuses that you’ve received in the past year before your injury and we put that all together and come up with your average weekly wage and your weekly check while you’re out of work on workers comp will be 62% of your average weekly wage.

Your weekly check is going to be 62% of your average weekly wage and there is a statute that spells out exactly how you calculate your average weekly wage and that is you look at what you’ve made each week in the 13 weeks prior to your injury and take an average of that you also include the average overtime or bonus you’ve earned in the year before your injury into that figure that average weekly wage figure and then once you’ve come up with the correct calculation of what your average weekly wage is your weekly benefit check will be 62% of that average weekly wage.

The benefits that fall under the Workers Compensation Act, or that you are potentially entitled to if you have a claim, are:

First and foremost, a weekly check called indemnity that you receive while you’re out of work and unable to work. That weekly benefit check amounts to 62% of what you make on average.

You’re entitled also to medical benefits, which is treatment that you need to get better or to relieve you from your injuries, and the insurance company has to pay for that. That’s the second main benefit.

Third, there are forms of what we call specific compensation—money that’s paid to you in addition to your weekly check. That is typically for cases where you are disfigured by your injury in some way. For example, if you have a limp that’s now permanent because of your injury, or a burn or a scar or anything else that’s disfiguring, that is a separate payment to you under the Workers Compensation Act.

There’s loss of use compensation, which applies if you have a certain percentage loss of use of an appendage or an extremity—you have a right to a payment beyond just what you’re getting in your weekly check, and that comes down to a statutory formula depending on what percentage of loss you have.

You may have certain vocational services and rehabilitation benefits that you could be entitled to, and other rights like the right to reinstatement to your job and other protections under the Workers Compensation Act. But the main forms of benefits are: paying your medical bills, paying you weekly benefits, and paying you compensation for scarring or loss of use. And if you’re totally disabled, there are dependency benefits if you have a dependent spouse or children.

Your medical provider plays a very important—perhaps the most important—role in your case, because so much of your entitlement and your rights to benefits under the Workers Comp Act come down to medical evidence. And the medical evidence, of course, comes from your medical provider.

You can claim that you’re no longer able to work, but just you saying so, as you can imagine, isn’t enough. We need medical evidence and a medical opinion to support many, many of the claims that are made in the workers comp system. And so many of the benefits or the treatment that we fight to get for you have to be supported by an opinion—a competent opinion—from an expert.

In workers comp, that expert is more times than not a medical expert—someone who has the expertise, training, and experience that a judge is looking to rely upon to decide whether or not you’re entitled to benefits, or whether you are entitled to a particular treatment.

So medical providers, medical opinions, medical evidence is the driving force behind the majority of what happens in workers compensation.