If your car accident happened on your way to or from work, you can usually make a workcover claim. Plus, if the accident was not your fault, you can also make a CTP claim. To make sure you recover all your losses the best thing to do in this situation is make a workcover claim and a CTP claim at the same time.

Should you make a workcover claim?

The advantage of making a workcover claim is that they will immediately start funding your medical treatment and your weekly wages while you can’t return to work.

You don’t have to worry about waiting lists or finding bulk billing practices because WorkCover funds everything as if you were a private patient. While there will still be some waiting periods for some specialists, this is still much shorter than if you had to get treatment through the public system.

And while you are unable to return to work, WorkCover pays your weekly wages so you don’t have to use up annual leave and sick leave.

Is it worth making a CTP claim?

Yes, because WorkCover doesn’t cover all of your losses. In many cases, the difference can be $200,000 to $300,000 and in some cases it can be more.

To begin with, WorkCover only pays 85% of your wages and they don’t pay your super. Plus, after 26 weeks they reduce their payment to 75%. The loss of super and the difference between your actual wages and WorkCover’s payments add up, and the only way to recover this is through a CTP claim.

But the biggest issue is loss of wages which you might incur in the future due to your accident. This is called future economic loss. For example, let’s say you have a serious whiplash injury. Even though you can return to work, but you can’t work as many hours as you used to, or you struggle with the physical aspects of your work.

If you are 40 years old and you have to cope with the pain for another 27 years before reaching retirement age, you stand to lose a lot of money in future income. During that time you might miss out on overtime, you might not be able to apply for some jobs that are more physically demanding or you might have to retire sooner.

None of this loss is paid by WorkCover. As soon as you are well enough to return to work they will close your claim, regardless of what might happen in the future.

25% Cap on legal costs

In all of our personal injury compensation matters, we act on a  No Win – No Fee basis. What that means is, there’s no upfront cost to you.

In Queensland, most compensation firms will charge you 50% of your compensation amount – the maximum allowed at law. This is very expensive. Our fee is different. We will cap our fee at 25% . Remember also, these are the maximum fees we will charge. If our fee in your claim is less, then we charge the lesser amount.

Before you engage us, we will provide you a written Disclosure Notice and a Client Service Agreement. These documents set out in detail the service we provide, as well as our fees and outlays. Before you sign anything, you can take these documents home with you, and study them with your family. You can take as long as you need, there is never any pressure from us. If anything in these documents doesn’t make sense to you, we can discuss it with you and you are free to ask another lawyer to give you advice.  And remember, no win – no fee agreements come with a 5 day cooling off period for extra peace of mind.