Work Injury Lawyer Serving Hollywood

Hollywood is one of the principal cities in Broward County and has a population of over 153,000 residents. Many residents work at the cities top employers such as Memorial Healthcare System, The Continental Group, and Brandsmart USA.

At Frankl Kominsky, our injury attorneys aim to protect employees against physical or bodily damages that they incur while on the job. They try to help an injured party recover monetary benefits from the responsible party or the defendant to compensate the plaintiff for the damages sustained.

Our workplace injury lawyers maintain that employers should always provide top-quality work equipment and a safe work environment for their employees.

Employers who fail to provide a safe work environment and proper training when it comes to equipment or tools can put workers at risk of injuries and illnesses. Should a company fail to do so, it can and should result in consequences for the employers, holding them responsible for the medical expenses that the employee has to incur through no fault of their own.

At Frankl Kominsky, our workplace injury lawyers handle workplace injury claims in Hollywood, Florida, and throughout Broward County. Our injury attorneys are available to help victims after a workplace accident and have built a reputation for providing superior legal services. To learn more about the types of injury claims we handle, we encourage you to visit our website at www.FKLegal.com.

In Hollywood, Florida, many local hospitals, such as Memorial Regional Hospital and Kindred Hospital, receive thousands of emergency room patients that sustain injuries while at work or while performing a delivery or job task.

Accidents can happen anywhere, and workplaces are no exception. Oftentimes, these accidents are nobody’s deliberate fault, but employees have certain rights, and those rights have to be protected.

Common workplace accidents and why they are so dangerous include:

• Construction-Related Accidents: Fires and explosions in construction sites are common due to open wiring and leaking pipes.
• Scaffolding and Ladder Accidents: A painter can slip off a ladder when painting a roof.
• Transportation accidents: A worker can be injured when making a delivery or a pick-up while using a company vehicle.
• Burn Injuries: A firefighter can get serious burn injuries during a rescue mission.
• Pinned between Objects and/or Vehicles: A collapsing building can pin an employee to the floor or a wall, which can result in serious injuries.
• Slip and Fall/ Trip and Fall: A member of the janitorial staff can slip and fall on a wet floor while working.
• Falls from a Great Height: An electrical repairman working on power lines can fall from a height and injure himself gravely.
• Struck by Falling Objects: A brick or falling debris at a construction site can prove fatal if it hits someone in the head.
• Machine Entanglement: An employee can have their finger amputated after getting it stuck in a bench drill.
• Exposure to Toxic, Hazardous, or Harmful Substances: Someone working at a chemical plant who isn’t given proper safety masks and gloves can be exposed to dangerous fumes and chemicals.
• Electrocution: A worker can get electrocuted by coming in contact with loose or improperly insulated machine wiring.

Know your rights, and in case of any work-related injury or sickness, contact a personal injury attorney to try and hold the employer or business entity responsible for your losses.

An article by USA Today highlighted the probability of accidental deaths in some jobs compared to others. While the HR manager of your company has hardly any risk to his life when it comes to his work, the same cannot be said about a window washer who cleans the windows of the building that the HR manager works in. The window washer is in a precarious position for hours while he does his job.

The statistics of workplace injuries included in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual National Census Of Fatal Occupational Injuries report corroborate the fact that some jobs are more dangerous and pose a higher risk of injury than others.

The most dangerous jobs rated in the market, as well as what makes them so unsafe, are listed below:

Commercial Fishers

According to the report, the highest number of deaths on the job were in the fishing industry in 2017. Fishing and other related jobs involve working and carrying loads on wet, slippery, open decks and surfaces, with a lot of water turbulence. The combination of these factors often leads to slip and fall accidents, which can also result in drowning in the worst case. Drowning is the most common reason for death in the industry, and the fact that most fishers are working in remote areas far from land and emergency medical centers makes it worse.

Roofers

Building and maintaining roofs at such high altitudes automatically increases the risk compared to jobs where the worker has his feet on level ground. The chances of slipping and falling are high, and the possibility of the fall leading to serious injury to the spine or head, or even death is pretty high too. In 2017 alone, there were 91 fatal injuries to roofers and a whopping 2810 non-fatal ones!

Structural Iron and Steel Workers, Construction, Laborers, Maintenance, and Contractors, First-line Supervisors of Construction Trades and Extraction Workers

Structural and construction workers, laborers, and maintenance men often work at great heights, building skyscrapers, installing iron and steel works on buildings, bridges and towers, painting, and cleaning them. This naturally makes them vulnerable to accidental trips and slips. Because of the elevation they are working at, quite frequently, the fall becomes fatal or causes grave injuries.

Drivers/Sales and Truck Drivers, Taxi, Lyft, Uber Drivers and Chauffeurs

When your job description requires you to stay on the road for the majority of your time on the job – transporting and delivering materials on bikes, cars, or heavy trucks, and driving people around all day – the chances of fatal car accidents go up. There were over 77,000 road accidents in the profession in 2017, with 987 of them being fatal, resulting in instant deaths.

Landscaping, Groundskeepers

Groundskeeping is a risky job in the city, with an average death toll of 53 in 2017. This is due to the potential for contact with handheld tools, heavy-duty material, and hazardous chemicals that keepers use while on the job. These include chainsaws, lawnmowers, and tractors.

Electrical and Mechanical, Installers, Repairers, etc

Mechanical and electrical Workers, along with repairmen, perform a wide range of duties that put them at risk of injury; however, slips and falls are the leading causes of injuries in this field, which can sadly result in an accidental death. While you might expect that most injuries would be caused by dangerous contact with the equipment, it is actually slip-and-falls that result in the most deaths in this line of work.

Agricultural Workers like farmers

Almost 59% of the injuries in farming and other related jobs result in death, with the main cause being coming in contact with heavy farming tools and machinery, which are often not at par with safety standards.

Police, Sheriff, Corrections Officers, Firefighters, EMS

Unsurprisingly, the work of police officers, Deputy Sheriffs, Department of Corrections Officers, Emergency Responders, and other disaster workers like firefighter requires them to work in very close proximity to weapons and dangerous situations that leave them exposed to serious harm, and most of the time, even death. Ninety-five deaths were recorded in 2017 of police officers and sheriffs due to violence, and almost 34 for disaster workers in fire-related situations.

Warehouse, Grocery Store Workers (like Inventory, Delivery, Deli or Meat departments)

Warehouses and grocery stores can also have accidents at work, the most common ones being pinned between heavy loads, injury, death by way of falling objects, or coming in contact with huge transportation machinery.

A work environment and the job requirements are contributing factors in the types of injuries that can be sustained on the job. While a maintenance worker might have more spinal cord injuries, someone working in boiler rooms might have hearing loss, and sedentary jobs without the proper equipment might result in serious neck, back, and shoulder injuries.

Chemical burns, electrical burns, and hand-and-feet injuries might be more common in mechanical and electrical repair workers or people working very close to hot, heavy machinery, while people working at high elevations are prone to slips and falls and are more at risk of developing neurological injuries from head trauma, and paraplegia and quadriplegia from injuries in other parts of the body like the spinal cord.

In some cases, employees can suffer from a stroke or heart attack as a result of over-working, anxiety, and stress. Other conditions, such as depression, can be attributed to a stressful work environment or strenuous job duties.

People in different industries in Hollywood are at risk of various kinds of damages to their health and safety, and the severity of it varies from industry to industry. Whatever type of injury you endure, though, there are lawyers that can try to help you get the medical and legal assistance that such incidents may require.

In the State of Florida, companies are required to purchase Workers’ compensation insurance to protect their employees should one be injured on the job or lose their life as a result of a workplace accident.

Workers’ compensation insurance entitles a worker to coverage of their medical bills for initial and future treatment such as emergency room visits, prolonged hospital stays, rehabilitation, physical therapy, and more. In extreme cases, a worker may suffer from a serious injury, causing permanent disability such as paraplegia, amputation, and more.

The workers’ compensation program is meant to safeguard employee rights and protect the employee in case they suffer an injury or a disability while on the job.

In the event that an employee suffers an accidental death, the workers’ compensation benefits will cover unexpected funeral and burial costs, as well as medical bills related to the injury. When this occurs, it’s important to speak with a qualified injury attorney who has experience with personal injury and wrongful death claims.

In Florida, the workers’ compensation is a no-fault system, meaning that workers who suffer injuries on the job are entitled to workers’ compensation benefits even if the injuries were contracted through their own negligence or carelessness. So, in most cases, you are going to be fully covered by the employer or business entity, granted that you meet these four eligibility criteria:

Employee vs. Contractors

Not everybody who works for an employer is recognized as an employee under Florida’s workers’ compensation program. Freelancers, contractual workers, and independent contractors are not entitled to workers’ compensation. You are eligible for benefits only if you are a full-time or part-time employee of the company.

However, contractual workers are not without options either. Contractors that are injured on the job can file a personal injury claim against the employer for premises liability if they are injured on site. This also works if a contractor is hired to perform work in someone’s home.

Your Employer Is Covered By Workers’ Compensation

The vast majority of employers are legally obligated to purchase workers’ compensation, but not everybody is. Different states have different requirements when it comes to which employer should be purchasing a workers’ compensation insurance package and which doesn’t have to. Most states require the employer to purchase workers’ compensation coverage even if they have one employee working under them, while other states set the minimum limit of the number of employees anywhere from two to five. Under Florida’s law, any employer with four employees or more is required to purchase workers’ compensation insurance. If the employer is in the construction industry, then workers' compensation insurance is required with just one employee.

Your Injury or Sickness is Work-Related

Anything you are doing while on the job for the benefit of the employer or company that falls loosely within your job description qualifies as a work-related injury –be it loss of vision and carpal tunnel syndrome from typing too much and staring at a screen, or damage to the spinal cord from lifting heavy weights during loading and unloading at the warehouse.

In case of injury or damage on the job, workers can claim workers’ compensation. However, in some cases, they can even make a case for a third-party liability claim. A third-party liability claim is against a third party whose negligence or disregard caused you bodily harm.

Third-party liability claims can usually be brought against parties that are separate from your employers. It could be someone that your own employer had contracted for specific work or against a manufacturer whose defective material or equipment resulted in an employee incurring an injury on the job. An example of this is a contractual janitorial service that left the floor wet without warning and caused you to slip and dislocate your shoulder. If your employment has you driving for your employer and another vehicle crashes into you, causing an accident. Another example is the manufacturer of a chair that broke when you were sitting on it.

For third-party liability claims, though, the employee will have to prove the third party's fault in the accident and define the breach of duty taking place, unlike for a workers’ compensation insurance claim. Each person has a duty towards other citizens, and if they breach that duty of care, then they are liable to pay damages to the victims of their negligence. However, through a third-party liability claim, you can pursue compensation for damages that would not normally be covered by a workers’ compensation. These include:

Past and future medical expenses not covered by workers’ compensation insurance

• Lost wages and employment benefits not covered by workers’ comp
• Pain and suffering
• Mental and psychological harm
• Cosmetic damage such as scarring or disfigurement
• Permanent disability
• Hindrances in leading a normal life because of the work-related injury

Follow the link to learn about the documentation that you should bring to your personal injury lawyer consultation.

Workers’ compensation suffices in cases of personal injury and can be used for compensating damages like disability, pain and suffering, bodily harm, and paying medical bills (past and future treatment) and making up for lost wages.

However, in the unfortunate scenario where a person loses his life in a workplace accident, a wrongful death claim can be filed against the company or the employer, whose negligence caused the death to occur. A wrongful death claim is basically a lawsuit that is filed against the employer by a representative of the deceased person, usually a grieving family member that has suffered financial or emotional damage as a result of the actions of the defendant (the employer).

The surviving family members can file a wrongful death claim for damages such as medical bills and emergency transport, sudden funeral and burial expenses, and even to compensate the family of the victim for loss of support, companionship, or parental guidance.

Whether you are an employee who has suffered a workplace injury, or you’re a grieving family member of someone who has passed away due to an accident at work, you should not be running around, trying to file a lawsuit. You should rest and recover, while Frankl Kominsky takes care of the legal matters for you.

Our work injury lawyers have years of experience under their belts. We provide free initial consultations and offer a contingency fee, where you pay us after we have helped you successfully settle your claim or win your lawsuit and recover your money.

At Frankl Kominsky Injury Lawyers, we have over 40 years of combined legal experience handling accident and injury claims in Hollywood and throughout Florida. Our accident and injury lawyers have helped over 6,000 clients recover from their injuries while recovering over $200 million in settlements and verdicts. If you or a loved one was injured at work, let our legal team assist you with your personal injury claim and help you get your life back on track.

For those who have lost a loved one in an accidental death, our wrongful death attorneys can help you through this tragic time and try to fight for maximum compensation on your family's behalf. For a Free Consultation with our Broward Injury Lawyers, call 954-800-8000. We offer free in-home and hospital visits and stand by our superior client services. Frankl Kominsky is available to serve victims of work injuries all over Florida, so if you need legal representation, fill out Frankl Kominsky’s free consultation form for any questions, appointments, or case evaluations, or simply call their office at 954-627-1661.