Good morning! This is Legal Tip Tuesday with Michael Quatrini. We’re going to talk a little bit about the difference between Workers’ Compensation and Social Security Disability.

What do we have to prove in either case? I like to think of them as two different areas of the law, because they are. In Workers’ Compensation, we can only use your “work related injury”. Be it a shoulder, be it a knee, be it a head injury, to prove that you can’t go back to your “time of injury” job. Even if you are sent for light duty by your doctor, the employer must provide light duty or keep you on your Workers’ Compensation checks. Again, with Workers’ Comp, we’re only looking at your work related injury and condition.

In Social Security Disability, we get to use anything that you may be diagnosed with to prove that you can’t do your job, or old jobs, eight hours a day, five days a week. I like to think of it as a pot of soup. I get to take anything that might be wrong with you, anything that you’re treating at your doctors for, put it into the soup, and serve that soup to the judge at the end of the day.

Because I get to use all of your conditions, we don’t have to worry about how you got them, how long you’ve been treating for them, it’s just that they exist, and that they have limitations that are preventing you from working on a full-time basis.

So in Workers’ Comp, we look at the work related injury and disability. In Social Security Disability, we look that you as a whole person, anything that could possibly be wrong with you, including your work related injury. Those are just the big two ways that we look at those two areas of the law and what medical evidence will be necessary to prove disability in either Workers’ Compensation or Social Security Disability.
This is Michael Quatrini, Legal Tip Tuesday, explaining the difference between Workers’ Compensation and Social Security Disability.