The waterfront is a fast-paced and dangerous place to work, where injures are an unfortunate fact of life.
And to make matters worse, many of the claims related to those injuries are denied, heaping economic hardship and uncertainty onto the difficulties of getting medical care.
Hi, I’m Charles Naylor, I’m a Maritime lawyer, and I’m here to tell you that you’re not defenseless.
If you have an injury at work, there are four things that you can do, and if you do them, the chances that your claim will be paid promptly are greatly increased.
The first thing to do is to report your injury.
There are lots of reasons why people leave the job having not reported an injury, but there are no good reasons, and there are serious consequences if you don’t.
The most serious and the most likely is that if you leave the job without reporting your accident, your employer, almost certainly, is going to claim the accident didn’t happen at work.
The second thing you need to do is collect the evidence.
Take photographs of the accident scene and of anything that was involved in the accident. And get names, addresses, and phone numbers of anybody who was present, and particularly, of anybody who witnessed the accident, and write that information down.
The third thing you need to do is seek prompt medical attention.
People who are seriously hurt don’t usually wait days or weeks to see a doctor, and if you don’t see a doctor right away, your employer is at least going to claim that you didn’t think it was a very serious injury, and they may claim that the accident actually happened somewhere else.
The last thing you need to do is to contact a Maritime personal injury lawyer.
Under the Longshore Act, the Jones Act, and other Maritime statutes, you have rights, but you also have responsibilities, and you need to know both.
The law that applies to Maritime personal injuries is outside the knowledge and experience of most lawyers.
Our lawyers are available to you for a no-cost, no-obligation consultation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and our goal is to get you the information you need when you need it.
