Workers Compensation Attorney

>> I'm Stu Benson [assumed spelling] and I am an Attorney and I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. I do what's known as Workers' Compensation. It's a part of Employment Law. Workers' Compensation deals with individuals, workers, who are injured in the course and scope of their employment. They're -- in Pennsylvania and in every state there's a whole separate judicial system that deals with the consequences of those injuries if there is a dispute or even if there's not a dispute. Every day is an adventure. I -- one thing about people who do Workers' Compensation Law, I tend to represent employers or insurance carriers, sometimes employers are self-insured, sometimes they have insurance, and -- if they're not self-insured. And I represent them. If you represent the injured worker, you're on the opposite side. Occasionally I could do that. In an average day, maybe an average week, we are in hearings in front of Workers' Compensation judges every day. I'm in court every day. When we're not with Workers' Compensation judges in hearings we are dealing with physicians. Physicians have to testify, so we're in their offices taking their testimony, usually outside of court by what's known as a deposition. There's a court reporter, both attorney's and the physician, and we learn all about medicine, we'll leave it at that. And then we're in meetings with our clients to learn what's going on about cases that are coming up. And if you're in court in litigation and trial, you need to prepare for that, and that takes a lot of time. So one thing a Workers' Compensation attorney ends up doing is investing a lot of hours, maybe 60, 70, 80 hours a week of work. We travel a lot, because in Pennsylvania the case is heard [inaudible] a Judge in the county where the employee resides. If it's an out of state person, if they've moved out of state, then that gets assigned to the closest county to where they are. But, for example, my day or week, I can handle -- my territory generally is Harrisburg to the east. I can handle everything to the west from the southern border up to the northern border. It's a pretty big area, it's a lot of counties, a lot of what we call windshield time. So I get a lot of time to think when we're on the road.