Most people assume that getting hurt at work means filing a workers’ compensation claim and leaving it at that. That’s often the right first step, but it’s not always the whole story. When a third party (someone other than your employer) caused or contributed to your injury, you may have grounds for a personal injury lawsuit on top of whatever workers’ comp covers. That distinction matters enormously because the two paths lead to very different amounts of money.
Workers’ compensation is a no-fault system. It pays medical bills and a portion of lost wages, but it doesn’t compensate you for pain and suffering, emotional distress, or the full value of what you’ve lost. A personal injury claim against a negligent third party can. If you were hurt on the job because of someone else’s carelessness, a subcontractor’s faulty work, a defective piece of equipment, or a negligent driver, understanding both options is the starting point.
Goldman Daszkal & Stallone has spent more than 34 years fighting for people across Florida who were hurt through no fault of their own. Joseph Stallone and the team at Goldman Daszkal & Stallone handle workplace accident cases involving third-party liability, and they offer a free consultation to injured workers who want to understand their options before committing to anything.
Why Work Injuries Often Involve More Than One Legal Claim
The premise of Florida’s workers’ comp is straightforward: If you’re injured on the job, you’re entitled to medical care, and the injured worker doesn’t have to prove fault to be treated. This system has worked very well for Florida workers. They’re not burdened with proving employer negligence.
Yet there is a price to be paid for this efficiency. The amount of compensation available under workers’ comp is limited — far less than most workers expect. A serious injury can affect far more than a worker’s body; it can interfere with the victim’s career, family, and quality of life. Compensation for these impacts is not available under workers’ comp.
If a third party contributed to causing your work injury, however, you do not have to settle for the benefits available under the workers’ comp system. A personal injury lawsuit against a third party operates under different rules:
- Pain and suffering.
- Full lost wages.
- Loss of earning capacity.
You can recover for these types of losses in a civil lawsuit, but these damages are not available in Florida workers’ comp.
Injured workers and their family members often do not consider whether a third-party claim is possible or necessary. Furthermore, decisions and mistakes made during the early, frantic aftermath of a workplace accident can impact the value of the claim months or even years later. The way an accident is described and reported, whether reports are made in a timely manner, and the preservation of evidence can all affect what an injured worker is able to recover down the road.
Common Workplace Accidents Where a Third Party Is Often Responsible
Workers who get injured at work often assume that workers’ comp is the only legal remedy available to them. Usually, that is incorrect. Many work-related injuries occur in circumstances where a person other than the employer can be sued.
For example, a worker may be entitled to pursue third-party claims when:
1. A vehicle accident occurs while performing job duties. When a worker has been injured in a traffic accident, another driver’s negligence is not erased by the fact that the accident occurred during the performance of employment duties. For example, an injury to a worker in a car accident with a commercial truck could open up the truck’s commercial insurance in addition to any benefits available under workers’ comp.
2. A construction worker is injured as a result of the conduct of a subcontractor or because of bad equipment. Construction sites are crowded with individuals and businesses that are not employees of the general contractor. If the conduct of one of these businesses created a workplace hazard, or if a piece of equipment fails as the result of an error made during manufacturing, these third parties could be directly liable for a worker’s injuries, regardless of whether they are on the payroll of the company whose job site they were working at.
3. An employee who enters the premises of another business for work purposes is injured because of unsafe conditions. A delivery worker may be able to assert a claim against the owner of a commercial property if they trip and fall on the premises, or a worker may have a claim against a homeowner for injuries suffered while working in the owner’s home if they were injured falling down stairs or by another dangerous condition caused by the owner.
4. Employees are injured because defective tools and machinery fail. If a tool or piece of safety equipment fails because it was designed or manufactured in a faulty manner, the manufacturer of the defective product is potentially liable for your injuries. Who hired them doesn’t matter.
Settling workers’ comp in any of those cases results in the victim getting only part of what they deserve.
What Actually Happens When You Hire an Injury Attorney
Hiring an attorney can mean different things to different people, and some may believe it means signing a couple of papers and then waiting, hoping for the best — but that is certainly not how a law firm operates, or should operate.
When Goldman Daszkal & Stallone takes on a work injury case that might involve third-party liability, the firm begins by examining the incident and documenting what happened:
- Incident reports
- Interviews with witnesses while their memories of the accident are still fresh
- Video surveillance
- Site documentation
In cases involving vehicles, the firm will also retrieve the driver’s logs, maintenance records, and black box information before these can be destroyed.
Joseph Stallone and his team also take the time early in a claim to identify all the entities that might share responsibility for the accident. This isn’t a mere formality. Construction cases often involve multiple responsible parties, including the general contractor, subcontractor, property owner, and equipment manufacturer — each of which may be responsible for a distinct part of why the accident occurred. Missing one of those parties isn’t a technicality; it’s money the client never sees.
The firm is also focused on the amount of damages the victim has suffered and the impact those damages will have on their life. Medical bills are the easiest to establish, but what requires real work to document is how long the healing process will take, what costs are associated with future treatment, and how the injury affects a person’s ability to work and to perform the activities of daily life. When necessary, financial and medical experts can be brought in to verify these numbers for both settlement negotiations and trial.
Work Injury Statistics: How Often Are Others at Fault?
Most injured workers in high-risk industries never realize a third party may share liability for what happened to them — and the numbers suggest that gap is significant. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 2.6 million non-fatal workplace injuries and illnesses in private industry in a single year, with construction, transportation, and warehousing consistently accounting for the most severe cases. Severity matters here because the higher the stakes, the more a workers’ comp cap costs you in real dollars — and the more a third-party claim is worth pursuing.
Construction, health care, hospitality, and transportation all play a huge part in the Florida economy. Employees who work in these sectors are constantly coming into contact with other companies and other companies’ employees, other people’s property, and machines and tools whose manufacturers they may not even know. Any one of those contact points is a potential third-party liability claim. The tools to pursue that are available — most injured workers just don’t know to ask.
Workers’ Comp vs. Personal Injury Lawsuit: What’s the Difference?
Here’s where things can get a bit muddied for the victim. If a victim receives workers’ comp and then subsequently wins an injury lawsuit, the workers’ comp insurance company is entitled to reimbursement from any funds the victim receives in the lawsuit. This is called a subrogation lien, and it’s something the attorney has to deal with and account for.
However, this doesn’t mean the value of the lawsuit goes away, nor does it disappear entirely. Most importantly, the damages awarded under a lawsuit — such as physical pain and suffering, total wage loss, and loss of enjoyment of life — simply do not exist within the workers’ comp system. In fact, they usually aren’t mutually exclusive but rather additive, and once a subrogation lien is settled, an injured worker will almost certainly be much better off bringing both claims than bringing only a workers’ comp claim. The only difficulty, which is what makes it hard to handle on your own without injury attorneys, is the timing and the number of insurance companies, medical providers, and civil suit elements all involved. Attempting to manage it without an attorney will almost always cost people money they didn’t expect.
Two Deadlines Every Injured Worker Needs to Know
It’s easy to forget that there are really two statutes of limitation involved once you’ve been hurt on the job, and both of them start ticking.
1. For workers’ compensation, you have 30 days from the date you were injured to report it to your employer. If you don’t, you could lose your benefits. The insurance carrier will argue that a delayed report means the injury didn’t happen at work, so be sure to report it right away.
2. For a third-party personal injury claim, in Florida, the statute of limitations is almost always two years from the date of the accident. If you wait too long to hire an attorney, evidence may be lost. You want an attorney from the start, when the evidence and witnesses are still available.
The rule of thumb is: as soon as you are medically stable enough to do it, hire an attorney. You don’t have to have all your ducks in a row for a free case evaluation. That’s what a consultation is.
You Don’t Have to Be Rich to Hire a Work Injury Lawyer
One of the reasons people don’t call a personal injury lawyer is because they think they can’t afford one. In personal injury cases, they are almost always wrong. Goldman Daszkal & Stallone works on a contingency fee basis. You don’t pay anything up front. If you have a successful case, we charge no attorney’s fees unless you recover the compensation you deserve. If your case doesn’t do anything for you, you don’t have to pay anything at all.
Your free consultation is not a sales pitch. It is a discussion of what you have, what the facts are, what claims you may have, and where you go from there. Joseph Stallone has handled enough of these cases to give you a straight answer about whether a third-party claim makes sense or whether workers’ compensation is the best and only route. All it takes is the cost of a phone call.
When the Job Injury Is Catastrophic
When you’ve had an accident on the job in which you suffer something like a cut that heals in two weeks, versus an accident in which you suffer a traumatic brain injury in a fall on a construction site, these are not the same circumstances at all.
When you’ve been left with catastrophic injuries in the course of a workplace accident — a permanent disability, years of care you will need, a career that no longer exists for you — the difference between what workers’ compensation can give you and what you really need for the rest of your life is enormous. These are the cases in which an accident attorney with real resources and trial experience makes a big difference in the outcome. With 34 years of injury experience in Florida, Goldman Daszkal & Stallone has recovered over half a billion dollars in settlements for serious injury cases. This is not a number we’ve thrown out lightly; it reflects decades of injury work across every type of injury severity, including the ones that permanently alter the course of someone’s life.
In some cases, the path to full compensation runs even closer to home.
When Injured Workers Can Sue Their Employer Directly
Most of the time, you cannot file a lawsuit against your employer. But there are situations in which you can. If your employer intended for you to be injured or failed to carry workers’ compensation coverage when they were required to do so, you may be able to sue them directly. And then there are situations in which the injury you’ve suffered is so different from what workers’ compensation was created to cover that you can file a direct claim.
These are not common scenarios, but they’re worth a five-minute conversation, because the difference in what you can recover is not small. Assuming they don’t apply without first investigating is how potential claims go unfiled.
Steps to Take Immediately If You Get Injured on the Job
Even if you haven’t yet hired an attorney after a work accident, there are certain steps that can make a huge difference:
- Let your employer know that you have been injured as soon as possible, and put that notification in writing.
- Ask for a copy of your incident report.
- Take pictures of the scene, your injuries, and anything that could have caused the accident or made it worse.
- Ask witnesses to stay at the scene, and write down their contact information.
- See a doctor right away and keep following through on your treatment plan.
- Write down everything you spend on your care.
- Do not give a recorded statement to any insurance company before speaking with an attorney — a polite ‘I’m consulting with a lawyer’ is all you need to say.
What to Expect at Your Free Consultation
At Goldman Daszkal & Stallone, we will review your case facts over the phone or in person and be honest with you about whether we believe there is a viable work injury claim. If there is, we’ll be happy to discuss the evidence that may be uncovered, the people and organizations who might be liable, the potential for damages, and how long we think your case will take.
We never expect you to decide whether or not to hire a firm until you know enough about your case to make an informed decision. In more than 5,000 successful Florida cases, accident lawyer Joseph Stallone and the law firm of Goldman Daszkal & Stallone have always placed the well-being of clients above all else and built legal strategies around that goal.
If you were injured at work and you’re not sure whether anyone besides your employer played a role, speak with a Florida injury lawyer for free at your local injury law firm. If you have a personal injury case, you can talk to an attorney at no cost, and a firm that has recovered over half a billion dollars for injured Floridians is worth one phone call. Reach out for a free consultation to determine where you stand in the legal process.
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