If you have been injured at work, you may bee feeling angry. If it has left you unable to work, you may be worried about how you are going to provide. You may want to file a third-party claim.
A first-party claim is your claim against your employer for workers’ compensation benefits. If you want to receive compensation for pain, suffering, and other damages that you might have, you would have to file a claim against a third party, someone outside of that employer/employee relationship. A third party could be another subcontractor, a general contractor, or an owner.
You may want to make sure that you have an idea of potential third parties at the initial stages so that you can determine who is responsible for what on the construction site, allowing you to properly determine against whom you may file your third-party claim. To illustrate, people can be involved in automobile accidents while driving a company vehicle, and though these people may not be able to sue their employers for the accident, they can sue the individuals who caused the accident.
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Filing Both a Workers’ Compensation Claim and a Third-Party Claim
Employees can file workers’ compensation claims and still preserve their right to sue other parties for their injuries. You cannot receive medical coverage without filing a workers’ compensation claim, but if you do have a third-party claim, the workers’ compensation carrier will assert that it has a lien, and there are certain provisions in the workers’ compensation law that give the carrier that right. You may have to pay some money back to the workers’ compensation carrier once a case is settled.
If you would like to file a third-party claim, please call our Hamburg personal injury office to set up a free confidential case evaluation. Chiacchia & Fleming has handled dozens of cases just like yours and are dedicated to protected injured workers of Western New York.