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Hurt on a Charleston job site, warehouse floor, or restaurant line? Comp owes you treatment and wage checks. We make the carrier pay them.
Getting hurt at work in Charleston does not feel like a legal problem at first. It feels like a back that seized up at the end of a shift, a hand caught in a machine in North Charleston, a knee that gave out on a framing job in Mount Pleasant. Then the treatment starts, the paychecks stop, and an adjuster you have never met begins deciding what happens to you. Schiller and Hamilton Law Firm represents injured workers from our Charleston office at 1629 Meeting Street Road.
South Carolina built its comp system on a no-fault premise, so what matters is that the injury happened on the job, not who made a mistake. Claims stall anyway. Treatment gets delayed, checks arrive late, impairment ratings come back lower than the injury deserves. We know what the Workers’ Compensation Commission expects and what the carrier is required to do. Call 843-350-5420 for a free consultation.
Most injury cases require proof that somebody was careless. Comp does not. The Commission describes the Act as relieving employers of common law negligence suits in exchange for covering medical costs and lost wages regardless of fault. What you have to establish instead is that you suffered an injury by accident arising out of and in the course of your employment.
That reaches most of the work done here. A picker who tears a rotator cuff in a distribution center off Ashley Phosphate Road, a line cook scalded in a downtown kitchen, a nurse hurt moving a patient, a landscaper who goes down in August heat, a framer off a ladder in Summerville. None of it requires you to accuse anyone of anything. Waterfront and maritime work can fall under a separate federal compensation system, which is worth sorting out early.
The trade is that the Act is generally your exclusive remedy against your employer, so you cannot also sue them in court over the same injury. In return you are supposed to get faster care and wage replacement. Supposed to. The carrier controls the pace, and that is where pushing back matters.
Medical care comes first and causes the most friction. The Act requires your employer to provide medical, surgical, hospital, and other treatment reasonably required. The part that blindsides Charleston workers is who picks the doctor: the Commission says plainly that in South Carolina your employer has the right to choose your treating physician, and that bills from a doctor you found yourself may go unpaid. Ask to be sent to the authorized provider, and tell us early if that provider is not listening.
Wage benefits cover the time you cannot work, at two thirds of your average weekly wage, capped by a statewide maximum tied to South Carolina’s average weekly wage for the prior fiscal year. Lost time compensation can begin on the eighth calendar day you are out, and if you are out more than fourteen days it reaches back to the first.
If you do not fully recover, permanent benefits follow. Permanent partial disability compensates lasting impairment, with the Act assigning a set number of weeks to specific body parts. Permanent total disability runs at the same two thirds rate for up to 500 weeks, and for catastrophic injuries such as paraplegia, quadriplegia, or brain damage it can continue for life. Nothing in comp pays for pain and suffering.
Two clocks run on every South Carolina comp claim, and either one can finish it.
The first is notice to your employer. No compensation is payable unless notice of the accident is given within ninety days. Do not ride that window. Tell a supervisor the day it happens and put it in writing, because the gap between the shift and the report is the first thing an adjuster will work on. For repetitive trauma, the kind built up over years of lifting in a warehouse or gripping tools on a site, the ninety days run from when you discovered, or reasonably could have discovered, that the condition is compensable.
The second is the filing itself, which is a separate step from telling your boss. Your right to compensation is barred unless a claim is filed with the Commission within two years of the accident, on a Form 50 or Form 52. Repetitive trauma claims run two years from when you knew or should have known, and no more than seven years from the last injurious exposure.
A denial letter is a position, not a verdict. Carriers turn Charleston claims down for a short list of reasons, and plenty of them fall apart under pressure. You were told the injury did not happen at work. You waited too long to report it. The MRI shows degeneration, so the carrier calls it pre-existing rather than a work injury that made a quiet condition disabling.
You have the right to take that to a hearing before the Workers’ Compensation Commission. A commissioner hears the evidence, including medical records, the treating physician’s opinions, wage records, and your own testimony about what the job actually involved, and decides whether benefits are owed.
This is where the work concentrates. We know which medical opinions carry weight with a commissioner, how to prepare you to be questioned, and how to answer the carrier’s version of your job duties. If your benefits were cut off or your claim was denied, do not walk away from it. Call 843-350-5420.
Comp is your exclusive remedy against your employer, but it does not touch anyone else. If a party other than your employer or a coworker caused the harm, you may be able to bring a separate injury claim alongside the comp claim. South Carolina law expressly lets an injured worker enforce those rights against a third party.
Charleston work produces these constantly. A delivery driver rear-ended on I-26 while running a route. A subcontractor whose crew drops something on yours at a Mount Pleasant build. A machine or lift that failed because of how it was made or maintained by an outside company. A property owner whose site was unsafe when your employer sent you there.
It matters because comp never pays for pain and suffering and replaces only part of your wages. A third party case can reach those losses, though unlike comp it does require proof of fault, and South Carolina bars recovery if your share of the blame is greater than the other side’s. Your employer’s carrier also holds a lien on what you recover, up to the compensation it paid. Running both cases together takes coordination from the start.
Nothing requires you to hire anyone to file a claim. The problem is the imbalance. The carrier already has an adjuster, a nurse case manager, and defense counsel whose job is to hold down what the file costs. You have a job you cannot do and a doctor you did not choose.
We make sure the injury is reported and the claim is filed before either deadline closes, and that the wage records used to set your weekly check reflect what you actually earned, including overtime and a second job where the law allows. We press for the treatment the authorized physician says you need, challenge an impairment rating that reads like a discount, and take the case to a hearing when the carrier will not move.
Schiller and Hamilton handles these on a contingency fee, so there is no fee unless we recover benefits for you, and the consultation costs nothing. Call 843-350-5420 or come by the office on Meeting Street Road.
No. South Carolina comp rests on a no-fault premise, and the Commission describes the Act as covering medical costs and lost wages regardless of fault. What you show is that you suffered an injury by accident arising out of and in the course of your employment. That is the central difference between a comp claim and a negligence lawsuit.
Report it the day it happens. By statute, no compensation is payable unless you give your employer notice within ninety days of the accident. Filing the claim is a separate step: your right to compensation is barred unless a claim is filed with the Commission within two years of the accident, using a Form 50 or Form 52. Repetitive trauma injuries follow a discovery rule.
Your employer does. The Commission states that in South Carolina the employer has the right to choose your treating physician, and warns that bills may go unpaid if you see a doctor of your own choosing. You can ask the employer’s representative to approve a different doctor. If the authorized physician is ignoring your symptoms, tell us.
A denial is not the end of it. You can request a hearing before the Workers’ Compensation Commission, where a commissioner weighs medical records, wage records, and testimony and decides whether benefits are owed. Denials built on a reporting gap or a pre-existing condition argument often do not survive that. Get a lawyer involved before a deadline passes.
Nothing up front. The consultation is free and we handle workers’ compensation cases on a contingency fee, which means no fee unless we recover benefits for you. Call 843-350-5420 to talk through what happened at no cost and no obligation.
No fee unless we recover.
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Free, no obligation review of your Charleston work injury claim. No fee unless we recover benefits.
