Titusville Workers’ Compensation Lawyer

If you got hurt on the job here, the hard part started before any legal question came up. Telling your boss feels risky, because you need this job and you do not want to be the employee with a claim on file. Someone has probably already sent you to a clinic you did not pick. Under both worries sits money. You have to live on something while your body decides how bad this is.

Start with the report, because a late report ends most claims here. Retaliation, whether you need a lawyer at all, and the fee come next. The benefit rules, the doctor rules and the statute citations sit further down.

Report It in Writing Within 30 Days

Tell your employer you got hurt at work before you do anything else. Report late and Florida law kills your claim in nearly every case, however badly you’re hurt.

You’ve got 30 days. Put the report in writing, keep a copy, and don’t rely on having mentioned it to a supervisor in a hallway.

Write down the date, the time, what you were doing and who saw it happen. A written report on day three beats a perfect memory on day ninety.

You may also be less late than you think. A worn-out shoulder or a bad back has its own starting date, and the clock on a repetitive injury runs from the day you knew the work caused it.

Your Employer Can’t Fire You for Reporting

Most people wait for a reason that has nothing to do with paperwork. You need the job, and you don’t want to be the employee with a claim on file.

Florida bans retaliation for filing a comp claim by name, and a firing that follows a report becomes a separate claim of its own. An employer who fires you for reporting has handed you a second case.

Reporting protects the job in a plainer way too. A claim on file is what makes a light-duty assignment, a doctor’s restriction and a paycheck substitute enforceable.

Report the injury in writing and keep working if you can. Nothing about a written report requires you to stop showing up.

A Comp Claim That’s Running Right Doesn’t Need Us

Plenty of comp claims run fine without a lawyer. You report on time, the carrier accepts the claim, the clinic treats you, the checks arrive, and you go back to work. Nobody needs to take a percentage of a claim that runs itself.

A claim turns adversarial at moments you can recognize. The carrier denies a benefit. Fourteen days pass with no check and no denial letter. The company doctor says you’ve reached maximum improvement while you still can’t lift your arm.

Call us when a denial, a missed check or a premature discharge shows up, and call us before you sign anything that settles the claim. A comp settlement closes your medical care as well as the money, and a closed claim stays closed.

The call costs nothing. If your claim is running the way it should, we’ll tell you and you can carry on without us.

What a Workers’ Comp Lawyer Costs

The fee in a comp case is set by comp’s own law, so none of the numbers on our other pages apply here. Our other Titusville pages describe the sliding percentage caps the Florida Bar sets for ordinary injury lawsuits. Chapter 440 writes its own schedule instead. The fee starts at 20 percent of the first $5,000 of benefits the lawyer gets you, then 15 percent of the next $5,000. After that it is 10 percent of the rest of the benefits due in the first ten years after the claim is filed, and 5 percent of anything secured after those ten years.²² So the last step down is about time, not size.

In 2016 the Florida Supreme Court held that the schedule cannot be applied as an unbendable rule.²² The schedule now works as a starting point, and a judge may adjust a fee that comes out unreasonable. We can tell you the schedule and a judge’s power to adjust it. No firm can quote you one flat number at the door.

You never write Andrew Pickett Law a check to get started, and you never see an hourly bill from us. If we get you nothing there is no fee. Where the money comes from depends on how the case ends. When the carrier denies a benefit and we win it back, Florida makes the carrier pay our fee on top of what you receive.^22a When the case ends in a lump-sum settlement instead, the fee comes out of that settlement. We put the fee on the table at the first meeting, because the percentages are public and the arithmetic is short. Ask us which one your case looks like, and ask us to walk the schedule against the benefits you expect, before you sign anything. Ask any other firm you talk to for the same thing. We work your claim for everything it will pay, and we would rather you understand that number than take it on faith.

We Treat Telling You the Next Deadline as Part of the Job

Andrew spent years as a prosecutor in the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit before he represented injured people, and he has stood in the local courtrooms where the lawsuit half of a work injury gets tried. He trained at the Trial Lawyers College, and he tries injury cases to verdict. An insurance company prices a file differently when the lawyer across from it has taken cases to a jury.

Clients tell us the same thing in their reviews: they always knew what was happening in their own case. A comp claim runs on deadlines measured in days, and a worker out of work is waiting on other people’s decisions. We treat telling you which deadline comes next as part of the job, and we’ll call you when something changes.

Tell Us the Report Date and What the Carrier Has Done Since

A first call is a conversation, not a commitment. You describe the injury, the date you reported it and what the carrier has done since, and we’ll tell you which deadline is running and what the carrier owes you now.

Bring the date of the injury, the date you reported it, and the name of the clinic they sent you to. You can call with no paperwork at all.

If Andrew Pickett Law takes your claim, our fee follows the comp schedule rather than coming out of your pocket. If the claim doesn’t need a lawyer, we’ll tell you and you can keep running it yourself.

Reporting Late Ends Most Claims, However Real the Injury

Telling your employer that you got hurt at work matters more than anything else you do this month. If you report late, Florida law bars your claim in nearly every case, no matter how badly you are hurt.¹ You have 30 days. Put the report in writing, so nobody can argue about the date later.¹

The 30 days do not always start with an accident, because many work injuries have no accident at all. A shoulder wears out under years of overhead work, a back gives way slowly under lifting, and long exposure damages lungs. For an injury that builds over time, the clock starts at the first sign of trouble. The law looks for the point where the problem showed itself and could be tied to the job.¹ Report when you first make that connection, even if the last shift you blame was years ago.

Florida law excuses a late report in four situations. The employer already knew about the injury. Only a doctor could connect the injury to the job. The employer never posted the required notice telling workers to report. Something exceptional stopped the report.¹ The first two exceptions do real work. A supervisor who watched you fall has knowledge that no missed deadline erases. A repetitive injury that nobody could tie to work without a doctor starts its clock at that opinion. Treat the exceptions as a net under a report that is already late, never as a reason to wait.

Firing you for reporting is against the law by name

The fear that stops most reports is the fear of losing the job. Florida law makes it unlawful for an employer to fire, threaten, intimidate, or coerce a worker for filing a workers’ compensation claim.² Trying to file one is protected the same way. A violation gives you a separate lawsuit against the employer, apart from the comp claim and decided in a different forum. Save every message and write down every conversation if you get treated differently after you report. A lawyer builds a retaliation case out of exactly that record.

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You May Not Be as Late as You Think

Plenty of injured workers read one sentence about a two-year deadline and decide they are finished. The deadline is real, and the start date is not the one most published material gives. Your two years run from when you knew, or should have known, that your injury came from your work.³

An accident is only the easy case. The machinist whose grip failed over ten years gets his two years from the day the connection became clear. So does the inspector whose breathing got worse across many seasons. No single shift on the floor starts that clock for them.

Payments push the deadline out again. Every wage check the insurance company pays, and every treatment it furnishes, gives you a fresh year from that last payment or treatment.³ A worker whose benefits ran for three years has not lost the claim at the two-year mark. The payments themselves kept the door open. Before you accept that you are too late, look up the date of the last benefit anyone paid you.

Some Employers Here Do Not Have to Carry This Insurance

Coverage here turns on headcount, and some Titusville employers do not have to carry it at all. A business outside construction must carry workers’ compensation once it has four or more employees. A construction employer must carry it with one. Agricultural employers are exempt at five or fewer regular workers.⁴

Someone hurt at a three-person shop may genuinely have nothing to file here. Being paid on a 1099 raises a second question, because the label on the paystub does not settle whether you are an employee. Check the headcount and your job classification before anything else in a small-business injury. They decide whether you are in this system at all.

A Badge at Kennedy Space Center Decides Which Law Covers You

A NASA civil servant and a contractor can be hurt on the same pad and hold claims in two different systems. The badge decides it, and getting that wrong costs a worker the deadline as well as the forum. Read the four positions below against your own employment before you count a single day.

Employment status decides which system you are in, and geography decides nothing. The belief that the fence line controls is the most common mistake in Space Coast work injuries. That mistake sends people to the wrong office with the wrong paperwork. If you are unsure which badge you hold for legal purposes, settle that question before you count any deadline.

The Titusville personal injury page covers the federal land rules for an ordinary injury lawsuit.

Being Careless Does Not Cost You a Dollar Here

The mistake you keep replaying does not reduce your benefits. Workers’ compensation is a no-fault system in the full sense of the phrase. A worker who tripped over his own bootlace collects the same benefits as the worker flattened by someone else’s forklift. The trade runs both ways, since you also collect without proving your employer did anything wrong.

If you have read another page on this site, you have met a harsher rule. In an injury lawsuit, a person found more than half responsible for an accident collects nothing at all. That rule governs negligence lawsuits and has no application to a workers’ compensation claim.⁸ Nobody will assign you a percentage of blame here, because this system keeps no such ledger.

Cause comes back into the case in one place: drugs and alcohol. A positive test after a workplace accident creates a legal presumption that the substance caused the injury. Refusing the test creates the same presumption a failed test does.⁹ The presumption gets harder to beat when the employer runs a certified drug-free workplace program. That is the opposite of what most people would guess. A worker facing a post-accident test result is facing the sharpest coverage fight this system has.

This System Never Pays for What the Injury Put You Through

Workers’ compensation pays for the medical care your injury needs. It replaces part of the wages you lose while you cannot earn them. The list ends there, because nothing is ever added for pain and suffering, at any level of severity, in any comp case, for anyone.^1010a Our other Titusville pages describe money for the human cost of an injury. Every one of those pages is describing a lawsuit rather than a comp claim.

The pain-and-suffering money this system never pays changes more of your decisions than any other fact about your claim. A settlement that looks insulting against months of pain may be exactly what the law owes you. The law was never pricing the pain. Money for what an injury did to your life does exist after a workplace accident. It lives in a lawsuit against someone other than your employer, and that door opens when a third party helped cause your injury.

The Insurance Company Picks Your Doctor, Not You

The clinic you were sent to is not a mix-up. Your employer buys this coverage from an insurance company, called the carrier in every letter you are about to get. The carrier chooses and pays for your doctor.¹¹ A visit you set up yourself, even to a doctor you have seen for years, is generally a bill the carrier will not pay. The rule surprises almost everyone, because in every other corner of medicine the patient picks.

Ask your employer for treatment first. If the employer fails to provide that first treatment within a reasonable time after a specific request, you may get that initial care yourself at the employer’s expense.¹² The request is the key. A worker who goes straight to his own doctor eats the bill. A worker who asked, waited a reasonable time, and then went has moved that bill to the employer. Make the request in writing and keep a copy.

You also get to switch doctors once per claim, and you can do it without hiring anyone. Weigh that before you decide whether you need us at all.

Your Pay Stops Before the Benefit Checks Start

Rent does not wait for an insurance company, and the first weeks after a work injury are the ones that frighten people most. Wage checks in a comp claim run on published formulas, so you can work out most of what you will get with a calculator. The starting number is your average weekly wage, meaning the average of what you earned each week before you got hurt. Every example below uses a worker earning $900 a week, because arithmetic is easier to trust when you can follow it.

The carrier has 14 days to pay you or turn you down

The carrier owes you an answer inside two weeks. The clock starts once your employer knows of the injury. It runs where the injury puts you out of work right away and keeps you out for at least eight days. By day 14 the carrier must pay the first check or deny the claim.¹³ Silence past that day is not ordinary processing. A claim sitting unpaid and undenied after two weeks is a claim that needs pushing.

Nobody pays you for the first week unless you are out more than 21 days

The carrier sends you no wage check for the first seven days you miss. Medical care is different and is covered from day one, so do not put off seeing the authorised doctor.¹⁴ The lost week comes back to you only if your disability runs more than 21 days, and then you are paid from the first day of it.¹⁴ A short recovery costs you one unpaid week. Plan for that gap in your first month, because the system builds it in on purpose.

Two-thirds of your pay while you cannot work at all

While your authorized doctor says you cannot work at all, your check equals two-thirds of your average weekly wage. The benefit has a formal name, temporary total disability, and on the $900 example it pays $600 a week.¹⁵ A cap sits on top of every comp check, set at 100 percent of the statewide average weekly wage. The cap trims only the checks of higher earners.

Light duty for less money does not end the checks

Going back to work on restrictions changes the formula instead of ending it. The system starts from 80 percent of your old average wage. If you now earn less than that mark, it pays 80 percent of the gap.¹⁵ The benefit is called temporary partial disability. On the $900 example the mark is $720. A light-duty job paying $500 leaves a $220 gap and produces a check of $176 a week. Run your own numbers the same way, because a check that does not match the formula is a check to question.

The statute book says your checks stop years before they really do

Temporary checks end at a milestone your doctor declares, the point where no further recovery or lasting improvement can reasonably be expected. The milestone is called maximum medical improvement, MMI on the paperwork, and reaching it does not mean you are well.¹⁶ It means the temporary stage of the claim is over and a different benefit takes over.

The printed law still says the temporary checks stop at 104 weeks. The Florida Supreme Court held that limit unconstitutional in 2016 and revived the older 260-week limit, and the legislature has never corrected the text.¹⁷ A worker reading the statute comes away believing the checks end three years earlier than they can actually run. So does a worker reading a page copied from it.

The rating your doctor writes down converts straight into money

After MMI, a doctor gives your permanent impairment a percentage rating, and the rating turns into weeks of a smaller check. The impairment check pays 75 percent of your temporary total rate, or $450 a week on our example.¹⁸ The rating buys two weeks of that check per percentage point up to 10 percent. From 11 through 15 percent it buys three weeks per point, four from 16 through 20, and six above 20. A 6 percent rating on a $900 wage therefore pays $450 a week for 12 weeks, or $5,400 in all. Seeing the arithmetic in dollars is the fastest way to understand why the rating gets argued about.

Why the Checks Start and Then Stop

Checks that arrive for months and then stop are the most disorienting thing this system does. A stoppage usually traces to one of two rules, and neither rule means the claim is over.

The first rule lets the carrier pay you while it makes up its mind. For 120 days after benefits begin, the carrier may pay you while it decides whether it accepts the claim at all. A denial can therefore arrive after months of checks that felt like acceptance.¹⁹ The window runs against the carrier too. A carrier that fails to deny inside the 120 days gives up its right to contest that the injury is covered. The only exception is a fact a reasonable investigation could not have found. Write down the date of the first check and count, because a denial on day 130 is an argument you can win.

The second rule lets a carrier stop your checks over a preexisting condition you never knew you had. When an MRI or X-ray shows wear, arthritis, or an old injury, the carrier gets an argument for stopping. It must keep paying only while the accident stays more than half responsible for your need for care. The comparison is against all other causes combined.²⁰ The standard is called major contributing cause. It is how workers in their fifties get cut off months into a claim on the strength of an imaging report. A cutoff built on that argument is a medical dispute, and a judge decides it rather than the carrier’s letter.

If They Say No, a Comp Judge Decides Your Case, Not a Jury

A denial is not the end of the road, and the road does not run through the courthouse our other pages describe. You do not file a comp claim in the circuit court, and no jury ever hears one. Disputes go to a state office called the Office of the Judges of Compensation Claims. An appointed judge who hears nothing but comp cases decides them.²¹ The paper that starts a dispute is called a petition for benefits.

The schedule after you file is fixed by law rather than by the insurance company. You get a settlement conference run by a neutral, called a mediation, within 130 days of the petition. The final hearing follows within 210 days.²¹ The hearing happens where you were hurt, because state law sets the final hearing in the county where the injury occurred. A comp judge hears a Titusville injury in Brevard County rather than wherever the carrier or the employer would prefer.

The state also staffs a free help line for injured workers with procedural questions. The Employee Assistance Office answers at 1-800-342-1741, and calling it costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Use it for the questions that are really about paperwork, and keep your own record of what you are told.

When Someone Besides Your Employer Caused Your Injury

Somebody other than your employer may owe you the money this system will not pay. Suing your employer is generally off the table, even when the employer was plainly careless. Coverage is the trade at the center of this system. The worker collects benefits without proving fault, and the employer gets immunity from injury lawsuits. The immunity gives way on one narrow showing, made by clear and convincing proof. The employer meant to injure, or hid a danger it knew was virtually certain to hurt a worker who could not have known.²³ Cases clearing that bar are rare, so plan on the employer not being a defendant.

Everyone who is not your employer stays fully suable. The same injury can support a comp claim and a lawsuit at once, whenever a third party helped cause it. The lawsuit is where pain and suffering can finally be claimed.¹⁰ On a launch complex that pattern is common rather than exotic, because crews from many companies share one worksite. The party at fault may be another contractor’s crane crew, an equipment maker, or a driver who hit you on the road. A delivery driver rear-ended on US 1 during her route holds two claims. She has a comp claim through her employer and an injury case against the driver who hit her.

The carrier takes part of any third-party recovery before you see it, and almost nothing written about these lawsuits says so. The carrier holds a repayment right against what you win from the third party, a claim on the money called a lien. It stands to get back 100 percent of what it paid you, after its share of costs and fees.²⁴ The repayment drops to a smaller share when the worker proves he recovered less than the full value of his damages. That reduction has a name, equitable distribution. Arguing it well is often the difference between a settlement that nets something and one that nets almost nothing.

A deadline sits under the third-party lawsuit too. If the worker has not sued the third party within one year, the carrier may bring the suit itself. If the carrier then lets a second year pass, the right comes back to the worker.²⁴ A case left alone for a year can be filed by an insurance company whose interests are not yours. Decide about that lawsuit early rather than late, while the choice is still in your hands.

The hospital lien described elsewhere on this site never reaches a comp case. Our other Titusville pages explain that a Brevard County hospital can claim part of an injury settlement. The hospital does it by filing with the Clerk of Court soon after discharge. The county ordinance behind that lien leaves workers’ compensation out entirely. No Brevard hospital lien attaches to a comp claim or to comp benefits.²⁵ The repayment to plan around on a workplace injury is the carrier’s lien described above.

If the Company Doctor Has Stopped Listening, You Can Replace Him Yourself

This system hands you one tool outright, and using it takes no lawyer, no filing fee, and no hearing. Once per claim you may demand a different doctor, and the demand has to be in writing.²⁶ After your written request the carrier has five days to authorize a replacement who is not professionally connected to the doctor you are leaving. A carrier that misses the five days loses the choice, and you then select the doctor yourself.

Injured workers give this right away every week by asking for it on the phone. A spoken request starts no five-day clock and leaves no proof, while a dated letter or email does both. Write the request today, keep a copy, and mark day five on your calendar. Many injured workers use this change, land with a doctor they trust, and finish their claims without ever hiring anyone. That is the system working the way it was designed to work. We would rather tell you so than watch you spend the change badly.

The limit on the tool deserves respect, because the change is once per claim and a claim can run for years. Spending it in the first frustrating week leaves nothing for the moment that decides real money. So does spending it on a replacement no better than the first doctor. A surgery recommendation or an impairment rating turns on one doctor’s opinion. Save the change for that moment.

Other Case Types We Handle

• Car Accident
• Truck Accident
• Motorcycle Accident
• Uber & Lyft Accident
• Pedestrian Accident
• Bicycle Accident
• Scooter Accident
• Golf Cart Accident
• Boating Accident
• Slip and Fall
• Premises Liability
• Airbnb and Vacation Rental
• Dog Bite
• Sexual Abuse
• Wrongful Death

Areas and Zip Codes Served From Our Titusville Office

• Titusville — 32780 and 32796
• Mims and Scottsmoor — 32754
• North Brevard County