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What if your maintenance is cut off? Take these steps to protect yourself before it happens.

Now the last way that the company fights your case usually is by cutting off your maintenance benefits. A lot of times people are injured the company will send them weekly advances. They'll pay them what's known as maintenance. Sometimes they'll even have a little extra amount on the check that's called an advance. Our office is very familiar with advances. We're very familiar with maintenance. Now companies will tell you flat out if you hire an attorney we're going to cut off your advances and some of them even tell you we're going to stop paying you maintenance. Well let me tell you that is highly illegal. They should never do that. Sometimes they're going to do it anyway though. If your company is threatening to cut off your maintenance or your advances if you hire an attorney the first thing you should do is consider if you have short-term disability or long-term disability.

A lot of companies provide great benefits to the employees. If you have short-term disability or long-term disability you absolutely should file a claim under that policy regardless of whether your company's paying you or not. If you do that you've got the short-term, long-term disability to fall back on. You're not holding up hoping that the company's going to keep paying you those monthly checks. Companies will even tell you not to apply for short-term or long-term disability. A lot of times they'll do that because they want to control your case. They want you waiting for that weekly or monthly check in the mail from them. Then when they threaten to cut those off you're in a bad situation. We always, always recommend to our clients if you get hurt on the job you want to apply for short-term disability and then eventually long-term disability. Some policies may not cover job-related injuries, that's okay go ahead and apply and they'll tell you that. The important thing is you want to take control of your future and the income you're going to get. You don’t' want to be relying on the company to send you the weekly or monthly checks to rely on.

Now let me leave you with a final thought about advances and the company telling you that they're going to cut the advances off. In Louisiana attorneys are allowed to advance settlement costs to a client in a case. Now in our cases unfortunately a lot of our clients have monthly living expenses, they need help from us, we are allowed ethically to advance monthly living expenses to our clients. So if the company doesn't take care of you, there's a good chance we're going to still take care of you.

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