Off The Record – Workers’ Comp – The C3 Form

Video Transcript

Hi everyone, my name is Greg Osborn. I’m an attorney at Turley Redmond & Rosasco, specializing in workers’ compensation, Social Security Disability, and many other types of law. But, today, I wanna talk about specifically workers’ compensation claims.

When you get injured, you will be filling out a lot of forms with the State of New York and the Workers Compensation Board. One of those forms is what’s called a C-3 Form. That is the claim form that’ll generate your claim numbers and move the case forward.

There are many questions on the C-3 Form. Most of them are very basic about your personal information, the employer information, and what kind of injuries you sustained. But at the very bottom of the last page of that claim form, you will see a question about prior injuries.

Now, this can be very confusing because it is a broad question. But it is important that you reference all prior injuries on your claim form. For example, if you hurt your right knee at work recently and you had an old right knee surgery, even if it was 10 years ago and you fully recovered, you wanna make that clear on your claim form that you had an old injury whether it was work-related or not. You can run into an issue with the insurance carrier claiming that you did not disclose your prior injuries and are therefore committing fraud.

The other places where you need to disclose prior injuries are with your treating doctor, make it clear that you would have prior injuries, and also at the independent medical exam.

Likely, at an independent medical exam, you’ll have a questionnaire about prior injuries. Again, a lot of times it’s not clear, but you need to claim all old injuries, no matter what the severity, no matter if it was work-related or not, or if there was a lawsuit.

If you need help filling out that C-3 claim properly, especially with prior injuries, please give us a call at 516-745-5666. Thank you.