Forked River, NJ Personal Injury Law Firms & Lawyers

I am a little confused by your question because you say the accident happened 21 years ago and your husband was never compensated after four years. There are two potential remedies available when someone gets injured on the job. The first remedy is to make a worker's compensation claim against your husband's employer. There are time limits that apply to making a worker's compensation claim and if those time limits are not complied with, the worker's compensation claim will be barred. I do not handle worker's compensation cases so I do not know what the Statute of Limitations is for worker's compensation claims. Therefore, I do not know if it is too late to make a worker's compensation claim. I am just pointing out the potential problem. You should check with a worker's compensation attorney. The other potential claim that may be available when someone gets injured on the job is to make a third party claim against the person or company that may have been negligent for causing the injury assuming that person or company is not your husband's employer. A third party case can not be filed against your husband's employer. The remedies available against the employer are limited to worker's compensation remedies. The problem with a potential third party case is that unless a lawsuit has already been filed against a responsible third party, that claim would be barred by the Statute of Limitations. 21 years ago the Statute of Limitations for personal injury cases against third parties arising from a workplace injury was one year from the date of the injury. (A few years ago that was changed to two years). That means a lawsuit would have had to have been filed within one year after the happening of the accident. Since we are now 21 years after the accident, if no third party lawsuit was ever filed, it is now too late to file such a lawsuit.

First it depends on whether you are asking for a fair division of the settlement between loss of consortium and her injury, or whether you are talking about dividing it as marital property in a divorce. If it is consortium that you are asking about, it depends on how severe her injury is, how it will affect her for the rest of her life, and how it has affected your life and how it will in the future. If you are asking how it should be divided in a divorce, that depends on a number of factors, such as what other marital property is being divided, any non marital property that you or she has, direct and indirect contributions to your acquiring marital property, your earnings capacity vs hers which relates to your relative abilities to acquire property in the future, how much of the settlement relates to your (the two of you) loss during the marriage, and how much relates to her future loss, such as future pain and suffering. There are probably more factors that I have not mentioned. If you have an attorney, you and your attorney should work on figuring it out.