Filing and Litigating a Workers Compensation Claim: A Practical Guide

Summary. This guide walks a workers' compensation claim from the moment of injury through hearing, appeal, and settlement, from both sides of the table. It explains what to say and to whom in the first forty-eight hours, how the average weekly wage is calculated and why it is worth auditing, how medical control and utilization review actually determine treatment, what happens at a compensation hearing and how it differs from civil court, and how to evaluate a settlement against the future medical exposure it extinguishes. It covers the parallel FMLA and ADA obligations employers routinely miss, the retaliation exposure that dwarfs most claims, and coordination of a third-party case with the compensation lien.

Workers' compensation is an administrative system, and administrative systems reward two things: paperwork filed on time and a coherent medical record. Almost everything that goes wrong in a compensation claim goes wrong in one of those two places.

This guide is organized as a sequence, because the claim is a sequence. Where the injured worker and the employer have different tasks at the same moment, both appear.

Stage 1 — The first forty-eight hours

For the injured worker

Report it, in writing, today. Verbal notice to a supervisor is legally sufficient in most states but evidentially weak, because the supervisor's memory in eleven months will be that nobody said anything. Send a text or an email. Two sentences: "I hurt my lower back this afternoon around 2:15 lifting a pallet in aisle 6. I'm going to get it checked out." That message is worth more than any affidavit written later.

Be specific about the mechanism, and say it is work-related at the first medical visit. The intake note at urgent care or the emergency room is the most important document in the entire claim, because it records a history given before anyone had a reason to shade it. "Patient reports low back pain, onset today, while lifting boxes at work" is a compensable claim on its face. "Patient reports low back pain for the past few weeks" is a fight.

Report every body part. Adrenaline masks injuries. A worker who mentions only the ankle on day one and the knee on day twenty is going to litigate the knee.

Ask what the state's medical control rule is. In employer-choice states, treating outside the panel can mean the bills are not paid and the opinions are not credited. In employee-choice states, the worker picks — and should pick a physician experienced with occupational injuries and with the reporting the system requires.

Do not resign, and do not sign anything describing the incident as non-work-related, personal, or pre-existing.

For the employer

Complete and file the first report of injury within the statutory deadline, which is often as short as a few days. Late filing carries penalties in many states and looks bad in every state.

Investigate immediately and neutrally. Photograph the area, preserve equipment and video, take short written statements from witnesses while their memory is intact, and note the worker's own description in the worker's own words. An investigation completed on day one is evidence; one completed in month four is advocacy.

Preserve the evidence. If a machine, ladder, or vehicle is involved, do not repair, modify, or dispose of it. If there is a possible third-party claim by the worker — or a possible subrogation recovery by the carrier — that equipment is the case.

Meet OSHA obligations. Recordkeeping under 29 C.F.R. Part 1904 requires the injury log, and serious injuries trigger short reporting windows — hospitalizations, amputations, and loss of an eye within twenty-four hours, fatalities within eight. See OSHA Compliance and Workplace Safety Enforcement.

Be careful with post-accident drug testing. Blanket automatic testing of anyone who reports an injury has drawn scrutiny as a practice that discourages reporting. Test where there is a reasonable basis to believe drug use contributed, and document the basis.

Say something human. The strongest predictor of whether an injured worker hires a lawyer is not the severity of the injury. It is whether the worker feels ignored.

Stage 2 — Filing the claim

Two documents are often confused:

The first report of injury or employer's report is filed by the employer with the carrier and the state agency. It opens the claim administratively. It is not the worker's claim.
The claim petition, application for benefits, or employee's claim is the worker's own filing with the agency, and it is what preserves the claim against the statute of limitations.

Do not assume the employer's report protects the worker. In several states it does not, and the limitations period runs regardless. Filing periods for the worker's claim typically run one to three years from the date of injury, and from the date of disability or discovery in occupational disease and cumulative trauma cases.

What to file with the claim: the date, time, and location; the mechanism in plain language; every body part; the names of witnesses and the supervisor notified; the treating providers; the employer and carrier; and the average weekly wage as the worker calculates it.

Stage 3 — Acceptance, denial, and the initial benefit calculation

The carrier will accept the claim, deny it, or pay benefits under a reservation of rights while it investigates. Many states allow an investigation window of two to four weeks during which benefits may be paid without prejudice.

Audit the average weekly wage

The AWW is the multiplier for every indemnity dollar in the claim, and carriers get it wrong constantly — almost always low.

Include, where the state permits:

Overtime, at the actual amount earned in the measuring period.
Bonuses, commissions, and incentive pay.
Shift differentials and premium pay.
The reasonable value of employer-provided lodging, meals, and vehicles.
Concurrent employment — earnings from a second job, in the many states that require it.
For a worker employed a short time, the wage of a similar employee or the contracted wage rather than an artificially low actual average.

Check the measuring period. Fifty-two weeks is common, but shorter periods, exclusion of weeks not worked, and special rules for seasonal, part-time, and apprenticed workers all appear. A worker who was on unpaid leave for six weeks during the measuring period will have those weeks dragged into the average unless someone objects.

Do the arithmetic yourself. Pull the actual pay records. A $140 error in the AWW is roughly $93 per week in TTD, and over a fourteen-month disability that is more than $5,600 — plus a proportionate error in the permanent disability award.

If the claim is denied

Read the denial notice for the stated reason; the response depends entirely on which of the standard grounds is asserted.

Late notice → produce contemporaneous corroboration and argue absence of prejudice.
No compensable accident → the first medical record, coworker statements, and any video.
Not in the course of employment → the premises rule, special errand, traveling employee, or dual purpose doctrine, applied to the facts.
Idiopathic or pre-existing → aggravation is compensable; obtain a causation opinion addressing acceleration or worsening.
Intoxication → attack the causal link, not just the test.
Medical causation in a repetitive trauma case → an occupational history with specific frequencies, weights, postures, and durations, and where useful an ergonomic job analysis.

File the request for hearing promptly. Denial deadlines are short, and in some states failure to request a hearing within the period is treated as acceptance of the denial.

Meanwhile, treat. A denied worker may need to use group health insurance, which will assert reimbursement if the claim is later accepted. Tell the health plan the claim is disputed; do not let the treatment lapse. Gaps in treatment during a denial period are used against the worker later, however unfair that is.

Stage 4 — Medical treatment, and the fights that decide the claim

Modern compensation practice is medical practice conducted by lawyers. Three mechanisms control it.

Medical control. Who picks the doctor, and when may the worker change? Employer-choice, panel, network, and employee-choice states all have different answers, and most have a one-time-change provision with a procedure that must be followed exactly.

Treatment guidelines. Most states have adopted evidence-based guidelines specifying presumptively appropriate care by diagnosis. Treatment inside the guidelines is generally approved; treatment outside requires a documented justification addressing the guideline's own criteria. A request for a lumbar fusion that does not address the guideline's requirements for imaging correlation, conservative care duration, and psychological screening will be denied on the paperwork, not the merits.

Utilization review. A request for authorization goes to a reviewer, often a physician in another state who has never examined the worker, who approves, modifies, or denies it. The appeal deadlines are short and jurisdictional in effect — in some states a matter of days. A denied surgery that is not timely appealed simply does not happen.

How to win a utilization review appeal: address the guideline criteria explicitly, point by point; attach the imaging and the conservative care records; have the treating physician write the response rather than the office staff; and request peer-to-peer review where available. Generic letters of medical necessity fail.

The independent medical examination. The carrier is entitled to have the worker examined. Practical advice for the worker: arrive on time, be polite, answer honestly, do not exaggerate, do not minimize, note how long the examination actually lasted and what was actually done, and write it down immediately afterward. Examinations that lasted eleven minutes and produced a nineteen-page report are cross-examination material. Bring an observer where the state permits it.

The counterweight is the treating physician's narrative — a report describing the job accurately, the mechanism, the objective findings, the causal relationship, the treatment rationale, restrictions, and prognosis. It is inexpensive relative to its effect and it is the most commonly skipped step in an unrepresented claim.

Stage 5 — Return to work

For the employer, a real light-duty program is the strongest available cost control and the strongest available defense to a retaliation claim. It requires:

Written light-duty job descriptions with specific physical demands — lifting limits, standing and sitting tolerances, reaching, keyboarding.
A designated coordinator who communicates with the worker and the physician.
Genuine work. A worker assigned to sit in an empty room is generating a constructive discharge claim.
Documentation of every offer, the restrictions it accommodates, and the response.

For the worker, an offer of suitable work within restrictions generally must be accepted; refusal can suspend benefits. But "suitable" means within the restrictions actually imposed, and a job offer that exceeds them should be declined in writing with a copy to the treating physician, not simply refused.

Do not confuse this with the ADA. A "100% healed" policy — refusing to return anyone with any restriction — is a well-established violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Reasonable accommodation obligations run independently of the compensation system and survive after compensation benefits end. See Reasonable Accommodation Under the ADA.

And designate FMLA leave concurrently, in writing, at the outset. Employers that fail to designate a compensable injury as FMLA leave lose the twelve weeks — an entirely self-inflicted wound. See Family and Medical Leave and 29 C.F.R. Part 825.

Stage 6 — Maximum medical improvement and the rating

At MMI, a physician assigns a permanent impairment rating using the edition of the AMA Guides the state has adopted — and the edition matters, because successive editions changed ratings for identical conditions substantially.

Audit the rating. Common errors: the wrong edition; failure to include a range-of-motion or sensory component the Guides require; failure to rate all injured body parts; converting a regional impairment to whole-person incorrectly; and failure to address apportionment properly where a pre-existing condition exists.

Apportionment is where employers reduce awards: the physician is asked what percentage of the impairment is attributable to the work injury and what percentage to pre-existing degeneration. States differ on whether apportionment is permitted, and on whether it requires evidence of prior disability rather than merely prior pathology — an important distinction, because nearly every adult over forty has degenerative findings on imaging and almost none of them had any disability from it.

Consider a second rating. Where the state permits an agreed medical examiner, a qualified medical evaluator, or the worker's own rating physician, a competing rating is often the highest-return expenditure in the case.

Stage 7 — The hearing

A compensation hearing is not a trial, and lawyers arriving from civil practice consistently misjudge it.

What is different:

The fact-finder is a compensation judge, commissioner, or administrative law judge — never a jury.
The rules of evidence are relaxed; medical evidence usually comes in by report and deposition rather than live testimony.
Discovery is limited and often informal.
Hearings are short — frequently half a day — and the record is built on documents.
Many states impose a presumption in favor of coverage or require liberal construction in favor of the worker.

What decides it: which physician the judge credits, and whether the worker's testimony is consistent with the medical records. Those two things, in that order.

Preparing the worker to testify. Know the medical chronology cold. Describe the job in physical terms — weights, frequencies, postures — not job titles. Describe limitations concretely and honestly, including the good days. The single most damaging testimony is an overstatement that surveillance video contradicts; the second most damaging is an inability to explain a treatment gap.

Preparing the employer's case. The job description, the light-duty offers, the wage records, the investigation file, the surveillance if any, and the examining physician's report — organized and cross-referenced. And decide, honestly, whether the dispute is worth the retaliation exposure that litigation creates.

Appeals run to an intermediate board or commission and then to a state appellate court, on a record, under a deferential standard — typically substantial evidence for factual findings and de novo review for questions of law. Compensation appeals are won on legal error and lost on factual disagreement.

Stage 8 — Settlement

The two structures

A stipulated award resolves the disability rating and leaves medical open for the life of the claim. A compromise and release closes everything, including future medical, for a lump sum.

Do not close future medical without pricing it. Ask the treating physician, in writing: what care will this worker likely need over the next twenty years, and what does it cost? Injections at $2,800 twice a year, a revision arthroplasty at $65,000 in a decade, and lifelong medication is a different number than "we'll offer you $70,000 to close it out."

Evaluating an offer

Build the comparison explicitly:

	Keep medical open	Close everything
Cash now	Lower	Higher
Future surgery risk	Carrier's	Worker's
Medication and durable equipment	Covered	Worker's
Utilization review fights	Continuing	Over
Certainty	Low	High
Effect on other benefits	Modest	Can be significant

Collateral consequences to address in the document itself

Social Security offset. Combined compensation and SSDI benefits are capped at a percentage of pre-disability earnings, and the offset can be substantially reduced by settlement language amortizing the lump sum over the claimant's life expectancy. That language must be in the settlement agreement at the time of approval.

Medicare. Where the worker is a beneficiary or reasonably expects to become one, address Medicare's interest under 42 U.S.C. § 1395y(b) and the implementing rules at 42 C.F.R. Part 411, typically through a set-aside with an administration and reporting plan.

Means-tested benefits. A lump sum can terminate SSI, Medicaid, or housing eligibility. Consider a special needs trust. See Special Needs Trusts and Medicaid Planning.

Employment. Many carriers want a resignation and a general release of employment claims as part of the settlement. That is a separate negotiation with separate value — do not give it away as boilerplate, and if it is given, price it. See Drafting a Severance and Release Agreement That Holds Up.

Third-party claims. Confirm the settlement does not release the third-party tortfeasor, and address the carrier's lien and future credit explicitly.

Approval. Nearly every state requires agency or judicial approval. Expect the adjudicator to confirm the worker understands that future medical is closed.

Stage 9 — The third-party case and the lien

If someone other than the employer caused the injury, there is a second, larger case. Sequencing rules:

Notify the compensation carrier of the third-party claim as the statute requires. Some states transfer the right of action to the carrier if the worker does not sue within a set period.
Do not settle the third-party case without addressing the lien. Settling and then negotiating is a much weaker position than negotiating first.
Reduce the lien by the carrier's proportionate share of attorney's fees and costs where state law provides for it, and press the made-whole rule where it applies.
Negotiate the future credit. This is the item unrepresented workers never raise. The carrier's right to suspend future benefits until the net third-party recovery is exhausted is frequently worth more to the worker than additional cash, and carriers will trade it.
Allocate the settlement in the documents — past medical, future medical, wage loss, non-economic — because allocation drives lien exposure and Medicare exposure both.

See Car Accident and Personal Injury Claims and Personal Injury Claim Toolkit.

Stage 10 — Retaliation, and the case that is bigger than the claim

Every state prohibits retaliation for filing a compensation claim, by statute or public-policy tort. Unlike the compensation claim, a retaliation claim frequently carries compensatory damages, emotional distress damages, punitive damages, attorney's fees, and a jury.

The fact patterns that generate them:

Termination within weeks of the claim, with no prior discipline.
A sudden performance improvement plan after years of good reviews.
A "100% healed" return-to-work requirement.
Refusal to accommodate permanent restrictions without any interactive process.
Threats — explicit or implied — about immigration status, hours, or scheduling.
Denial of a bonus or promotion tied to a departmental safety metric that the injury affected.

For employers: document performance issues before an injury, not after; apply return-to-work and testing policies uniformly; run an interactive process for any lasting restriction; and separate the compensation decision-maker from the employment decision-maker.

For workers: the compensation claim and the retaliation claim are different cases in different forums with different deadlines, and the retaliation deadline is often shorter. See Whistleblower and Retaliation Claims and Responding to an EEOC Charge.

A worked example

Facts. Teresa, 38, a certified nursing assistant, injures her shoulder repositioning a patient. She reports it the same shift by text to her charge nurse and is seen at the employer's occupational clinic the next morning: "right shoulder pain, onset yesterday while repositioning a 240-pound patient."

The AWW problem. The carrier calculates $780 based on base hours. Teresa regularly worked two twelve-hour overtime shifts a month, picked up a weekend differential, and held a second per-diem job at another facility. Counsel pulls a year of pay stubs from both employers. The corrected AWW is $1,065 — a difference of $190 per week in TTD.

The treatment fight. Conservative care fails. The surgeon requests an arthroscopic repair; utilization review denies it, citing insufficient documentation of conservative treatment duration. Counsel's appeal, filed within the seven-day window, attaches the twelve weeks of therapy notes, the MRI showing a full-thickness tear, and a treating physician letter addressing each guideline criterion by number. The denial is reversed on appeal.

MMI and rating. Post-surgery, the carrier's examiner rates 4% whole person with 50% apportionment to pre-existing degeneration. The treating surgeon, using the correct edition of the Guides and including the range-of-motion component the examiner omitted, rates 11% with no apportionment because there was no prior disability — only imaging findings. The judge credits the treating surgeon.

Settlement. The carrier offers $88,000 to close everything. Teresa's surgeon projects a probable revision procedure in ten to fifteen years plus ongoing injections — priced at roughly $95,000 in today's dollars. Teresa takes a stipulated award of $61,400 on the rating and keeps medical open. She returns to work in a scheduling role at $1,010 per week and receives a partial wage differential where the state provides one.

The lesson. The bigger cash offer was the worse deal, and the difference was one phone call to the treating surgeon asking what the next twenty years cost.

Special situations that change the playbook

The worker is undocumented. Most states cover undocumented workers, on the reasoning that excluding them would subsidize employers who hire them. Indemnity benefits are usually available; the contested issue is often whether wage-loss benefits can be based on a job the worker cannot lawfully hold, and states split. Threats about immigration status made in connection with a claim are independently unlawful in most jurisdictions and convert a compensation dispute into a retaliation case very quickly.

The worker is a staffing agency employee. Under the borrowed servant or special employer doctrine, both the staffing agency and the client company may be employers for compensation purposes — which means both may enjoy the exclusive remedy. The three-part inquiry is usually whether there was an implied contract of hire with the special employer, whether the work performed was essentially that of the special employer, and who had the right to control the details of the work. Getting this wrong destroys a third-party case at the pleading stage.

The worker is a subcontractor's employee on a construction site. Statutory employer provisions extend immunity up the contracting chain in many states, meaning the general contractor may be immune from suit. But sister subcontractors, equipment suppliers, and property owners generally are not. Identify the corporate structure of the site before assuming who can be sued. See Construction Contracts and Payment Disputes.

The worker was misclassified as an independent contractor. If the classification was wrong, the worker has a compensation claim and the employer may face uninsured-employer penalties, tax liability, and wage-hour exposure simultaneously. If the classification was right, the worker has an ordinary negligence claim against the hiring party, unconstrained by exclusivity. Either outcome is significant; the worst position for an employer is uncertainty. See Independent Contractor or Employee and Worker Classification Audit Checklist.

The worker was injured in another state. Jurisdiction in compensation is generous and often overlapping: the state of injury, the state of hire, the state of principal employment, and the state of the employer's residence may each permit a claim. Where more than one applies, benefits can differ by a factor of two, and the worker generally gets to choose — subject to credit provisions preventing double recovery. Check before filing, not after.

The injury occurred while working from home. Remote work has moved the "course of employment" line into the living room. The framework courts apply is unchanged — was the worker performing an employment-related activity at the time? — but the proof is different, and employers should have a written remote-work policy defining work hours and designated workspace. See Remote Work Policy Checklist and Managing a Multistate Remote Workforce.

The employer is disputing coverage with its own carrier. Sometimes the fight is not employer versus worker but employer versus insurer — over whether a policy was in force, whether an audit-based premium dispute suspended coverage, or whether a particular entity in a corporate family was a named insured. The worker's claim proceeds regardless in most states, often through an uninsured employers fund, with the coverage dispute resolved separately. See Business Insurance and Coverage Disputes.

Building the file, on both sides

The injured worker's file should contain, at all times, in one place:

A one-page case summary: date of injury, claim number, adjuster, carrier, AWW as calculated and as disputed, benefit rate, treating physicians, current work status, next deadline.
The notice trail — the text, email, or incident report showing when and to whom the injury was reported.
Every medical record and bill, in date order, with the first-visit note flagged.
Pay records for the full AWW measuring period, from every employer.
Every carrier letter, including denials, benefit calculations, and utilization review determinations, with the appeal deadline written on each in ink.
A symptom and function journal, brief and dated.
Every job offer and every response.

The employer's file should contain:

The investigation completed within days: photographs, statements, video, equipment condition.
The first report of injury and proof of timely filing.
The OSHA log entry and, where applicable, the severe injury report.
Job descriptions with physical demands for the pre-injury job and each light-duty assignment.
All light-duty offers in writing with the restrictions they accommodate.
The FMLA designation notice, dated.
Loss runs reviewed quarterly, with reserve challenges documented.
Personnel records reflecting performance history before the injury.

Frequently asked questions

"How long do I have to report the injury?" Notice deadlines are frequently thirty days but can be much shorter, and the deadline to file the formal claim is usually one to three years. In occupational disease and repetitive trauma cases, the clock generally starts when the worker knew or should have known the condition was work-related. When in doubt, report today and file early.

"Can I choose my own doctor?" It depends on the state. Employer-choice, panel, network, and employee-choice systems all exist, and most have a one-time-change procedure. Treating outside the rules can mean unpaid bills and discounted opinions.

"How much will I be paid while I'm off?" Typically two-thirds of the average weekly wage, subject to a state maximum, and generally not taxable. Verify the AWW yourself with pay records.

"They're sending me to their doctor. Do I have to go?" Yes, generally, and refusing can suspend benefits. Go, be accurate, be neither dramatic nor stoic, and write down what actually happened at the examination immediately afterward.

"They denied my surgery. Is that final?" No — but the appeal deadline is short, sometimes days. The appeal must address the treatment guideline's criteria directly, with records attached, written by the treating physician.

"Should I take the settlement?" Not until you know what closing future medical costs. Ask your physician to project the next twenty years of care and price it. Then compare.

"Will this hurt my Social Security?" The combined benefits are subject to an offset. Settlement language amortizing the lump sum over life expectancy can reduce it substantially, and it must be in the document at approval.

"Can I sue anyone?" Not the employer, in almost all cases. But if a third party — another driver, a machine manufacturer, a property owner, another contractor — caused the injury, that case is available and usually larger, because it includes pain and suffering.

"I've been fired. What now?" Two separate claims in two separate forums with two separate deadlines: the compensation claim continues, and a retaliation or wrongful discharge claim may exist. The retaliation deadline is often shorter. Do not let the compensation case consume the employment case.

"As an employer, when should I settle rather than fight?" When the medical evidence favors the worker, when the reserve is already impairing the experience modifier, when litigation will expose decisions that look retaliatory, or when the cost of the fight exceeds the disputed benefit. Compensation disputes are among the few areas of litigation where the accounting is genuinely knowable in advance — use it.

What the numbers look like: three realistic scenarios

Abstractions do not help people decide. Here are three claims with the arithmetic shown.

Scenario A — the accepted claim that resolves cleanly

Marcus, 29, a warehouse selector earning $980 per week, sprains his ankle stepping off a dock plate. Reported the same hour. Accepted within four days.

Six weeks off work. TTD at two-thirds: $653/week × 6 = $3,918.
Medical: urgent care, imaging, a walking boot, eight physical therapy visits. $4,610, paid in full with no copay.
Returned to full duty. Physician assigns a 0% impairment.
Total value: about $8,528, none of it taxable, no lawyer needed, claim closed in three months.

This is the system working exactly as designed, and it is the majority of claims by count. Nobody writes articles about it.

Scenario B — the disputed claim with a permanent component

Anita, 52, a hotel housekeeper earning $760 per week, develops progressive shoulder pain over two years and is diagnosed with a rotator cuff tear.

The denial: the carrier denies causation, arguing degenerative disease and no specific accident.
The response: an ergonomic job analysis documenting overhead reaching for roughly 240 room-turns per month, an occupational medicine causation opinion, and coworker statements.
The reversal at hearing, eleven months after the claim was filed. Retroactive TTD is ordered.
TTD for thirty-one weeks at $507: $15,717.
Medical: arthroscopic repair, therapy, injections. $47,300.
PPD: 9% whole person, converted by schedule to 38 weeks at $380: $14,440.
She returns to a laundry position at $690 per week; the state pays a partial wage differential.
Total: roughly $77,000 in benefits, obtained only because the causation evidence was built rather than assumed.

Scenario C — the catastrophic claim with a third-party case

Devon, 34, a HVAC technician earning $1,420 per week, falls through an unmarked roof opening at a commercial building owned by someone other than his employer.

Compensation: TTD for two years ($147,700), medical ($486,000), and PTD converting to lifetime benefits.
Third-party claim against the building owner and the general contractor: settled at $3,200,000, including pain and suffering, which compensation never pays.
The carrier's lien of $633,700 is reduced by its proportionate share of fees and costs to approximately $408,000, and the future credit is bought out for an additional $275,000 — a term Devon's counsel raised and the carrier had not expected to pay.
A Medicare set-aside of $340,000 is funded and professionally administered, with annual attestation.
A special needs trust receives the balance to preserve Medicaid eligibility for services the set-aside does not cover.

The point of the three scenarios is that the same statute produces radically different outcomes depending on whether anyone did the work — the AWW audit, the causation development, the third-party investigation, the lien and credit negotiation, and the benefits preservation. None of that is exotic. All of it is skipped constantly.

The deadline map

Nothing in this guide matters if a date is missed. Build this table for the applicable state at the outset of every claim and keep it at the front of the file.

Event	Typical range	Consequence of missing it
Notice of injury to employer	Immediately to 30 days; a few states shorter	Denial, unless the employer had actual knowledge or was not prejudiced
Employer's first report of injury	3 to 10 days	Penalties; extension of the worker's filing period in some states
OSHA severe injury report	8 hours (fatality) / 24 hours (hospitalization, amputation, eye loss)	Citation and penalty
Employee's claim petition	1 to 3 years from injury; from discovery in disease cases	Claim barred
Request for hearing after denial	14 to 90 days	Denial may become final
Utilization review appeal	5 to 30 days, sometimes shorter	Treatment denied without merits review
Objection to an impairment rating	15 to 60 days	Rating becomes binding
Notice to the compensation carrier of a third-party claim	Varies; often at filing	Right of action may pass to the carrier
Third-party statute of limitations	The state's ordinary personal injury period	Third-party claim barred, and it is usually the larger case
Retaliation or wrongful discharge claim	90 days to 3 years depending on theory and forum	Employment claim barred while the compensation claim continues
Petition to reopen or modify	1 to 5 years from last payment, where allowed	No further benefits despite worsening

Two habits prevent nearly every disaster in this practice area. Write the appeal deadline on the face of every letter the carrier sends, the day it arrives. And calendar the third-party limitations period at intake of the compensation claim, because the compensation file and the tort file run on different clocks and the tort clock is the one nobody is watching.