Atlanta Workers’
Compensation Lawyers

What is Workers’ Compensation?

Workers’ compensation is an administrative system of medical and disability benefits provided to workers who are injured on the job or who develop an occupational disease as a result of their job.

Prior to the Workers’ Compensation Act, you would have had to file a lawsuit and prove your employer was at fault if you were injured at work. The employer would try to negate one of the elements of your lawsuit by introducing evidence that it did not owe a duty to you, exercised reasonable care, your injuries were pre-existing, or eliminate or limit its liability by claiming you were also at fault by contributory negligence, comparative fault, or assumption of the risk. All of this would drag the lawsuit out, making recovery a difficult and lengthy process in which you must await the outcome of a trial.

The purpose of the Georgia Workers’ Compensation Act is to provide “prompt medical and disability benefits for injuries sustained on the job by workers, resulting in partial or total incapacity or death. In return, the employer is shielded from tort liability for these injuries.” As such, unlike other areas of personal injury such as auto accidents, the injured worker does not have to prove that the employer was at fault, only that he or she was injured in a work-related accident.

If you can establish that you were injured in a work-related accident, the claim is “compensable,” or covered by workers’ compensation and the employer and its insurance company have a legal duty to provide reasonable and necessary medical treatment and weekly disability benefits while you are out of work under an authorized treating doctor’s orders.

You Had an On-the-Job Injury; What Do You Do Now?

If you are injured on the job, report the injury to your employer immediately, preferably in writing. Employers and insurance companies are much more likely to deny a claim when the injury is not immediately reported.

After you report the injury to your employer, file the claim with the Georgia State Board of Workers’ Compensation by submitting a Board Form WC-14 as soon as possible.

Generally, an “injury” or “personal injury” means only injury by accident “arising out of” the employment and shall not include a disease in any form except where it results naturally and unavoidably from the accident. Injury and personal injury shall include the aggravation of a preexisting condition, but only for so long as the aggravation lasts. “Injury by accident” would certainly include a sudden, unexpected event—a trip-and-fall, for example—that interrupts your usual work routine. But, an “accident” can occur even if nothing unexpected, unusual or unforeseen happens. You may become injured simply by working in the usual and expected manner, in the ordinary performance of your job duties,—such as an onset of back pain while performing routine lifting on your job.

The injury must also be “in the course of” your employment. An injury occurs in the course of employment when it occurs on the employer’s premises, including a reasonable period of time for you to “enter” and “exit” the employer’s premises, or the “ingress” and “egress” of the workplace. Generally, an accident which occurs while you are going to or coming from work is not compensable, or covered by workers’ compensation. However, there are exceptions to this general rule—(1) if your employer furnishes transportation as an incident of your employment, (2) if you were performing some act permitted or required by your employer, which was beneficial to the employer, while going to or coming from work, (3) if you are on call and either furnished transportation by the employer or reimbursed by the employer for your transportation costs, (4) if you were injured while traveling from one workplace to another, or (5) if you were going to and from parking lots provided by your employer.