Approval of a workers compensation claim can be instant—as soon as you’ve missed more than three days from work. Or, um, sometimes the insurance company can delay or deny or put off, uh, memorializing your claim in the way that they should. If this happens, then, uh, again, consult with a workers compensation lawyer about that, and we’ll do what we have to do to get your claim approved. If we’re talking about filing a petition in Workers Compensation Court to officially establish and recognize your claim, then the, um, pertinent laws that apply are, first, that you can’t file that petition until the earliest, uh, 21 days after the injury. And typically, we don’t file these petitions in cases where you haven’t lost any time from work—you do need to be incapacitated or lose time to officially have your claim mature and before you can seek to recognize it or memorialize it. So, um, while an insurance company or the employer can do the right thing instantly and recognize your claim and open it and process it and start paying you, you can imagine that in many, uh, instances that doesn’t happen, or it doesn’t happen in a timely way, or it happens, uh, and you start getting paid but it’s not, uh, properly documented. You really haven’t been given any rights that you can exercise if they stop paying you. And again, this all goes back to one of the most important things to do in a workers compensation case, or in the case of a workplace injury, which is have it legally memorialized the right way—which is what your workers comp lawyer is—one of the chief reasons you hire them and one of the first things they do.