Bert Randall, President of Franklin & Prokopik, is a trial attorney concentrating in complex matters involving employment, tort liability and business litigation. He regularly represents companies in state and federal courts, and before state and federal administrative agencies.
Jim Hartstein is a third generation insurance professional, with more than 10 years in the industry, he has the knowledge and experience to give his clients honest and straightforward advice in a professional and understanding manner. He knows that insurance can be confusing and frustrating for the consumer.
Jim: So one thing that when I’m having this conversation with a client, Bert, one thing that I always say is once somebody’s been injured we shouldn’t figure out our plan, right? I think there’s it’s important that we have pre-work. One of the things that I love to do in my spare time is to love to coach football. So one thing that we talk about is let’s sort of think about everything that could go wrong and will work our way backward. So basically, in then that sort of pre-planning phase, some advice that we give the clients is that they really need to have a strong what we call a return to work program, right? So a well-written policy that’s going to sort of establish. You know, what everybody’s responsibilities are the fact that we have a transitional duty or light duty, the fact that we’re going to give post-access drug tests and things like that. Can you speak sort of about return works, what you like to see, what you don’t like to see that thing?
Bert: Absolutely, and I think you know like you said, it’s the old ounce of prevention pound of cure type analogy. Is that you don’t want to figure out your plan when it’s too late, and when it comes to the policies and things, you really want to be able to set everybody’s expectations. You know, when you have that written policy and not just return to work. That’s the biggest one, probably, but I like the reporting policy because you want to make sure that everything’s efficient. You want to just like an employment handbook with all of your other policies too. You want the employees to understand what their obligations are but also what they should be able to expect from you as an employer, whether it’s a risk person HR or safety whatever it may be so having them in writing and they don’t always necessarily need to be fully thought out you may not have every light duty option available to you, but just enough to convey that hey, yeah. We have a return to work-program after an injury. Here so, you need to talk to.
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