Javier Espinoza has made a name for himself in San Antonio and all of Texas as one of the leading experts in work injury law and on the job injury lawsuits. He is a friend of our firm, a very giving and sharing member of the San Antonio bar and a great attorney. We were lucky to get him on the show to share some of his wisdom.Transcript:Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.[music]Justin Hill: All right, this is another episode of Hill Law Firm podcast as I have Javier Espinoza here with me today who has been kind enough to do an episode of the Alamo Hour. I'm holding him over to discuss work injury cases with me. Javier is one of the best lawyers in our city, one of the best lawyers in the state. He is really chosen to focus, not exclusively, but in a big way on work injury cases. Our law firm has worked multiple cases with his law firm and even when we don't involve them, they've been an invaluable resource to myself and others in the city, and others around the state who have questions about representing injured workers.Javier, thank you for being here and I just want to start, why did you get so focused into work injury cases in your career and in your practice?Javier Espinoza: Well, the main reason is because I came to a new city from El Paso and when I got here, I was relatively unknown. I pretty quickly had to develop a niche, and number one, it was a niche that I really, really liked. Having come from a working-class family, I think it was a real natural fit to represent workers, but the bigger, I guess, business sense of it is it's very difficult to compete with everybody. I very quickly developed, I needed to pick a niche. When I started picking the work injury niche, I just fell in love with it because I fell in love with clients and I fell in love with the type of law, and it's so different than your regular average case that it really gave me a leg up, I felt.Justin: Yes, and that's important to talk about. Everybody that advertises, advertises as though a widget is a widget and a case is a case, and it's all the same. One of the biggest surprises to me as I started building my own practice and seeing more cases was the prevalence of arbitration agreements in work injury cases, work injury situations. What are some of the nuances to work injury that make it a little different than say, a car wreck or an 18-wheeler wreck?Javier: Sure. Well, there's three very specific types of work injuries. Number one, somebody gets injured at work. If they have workers' compensation, then you can't sue the employer, you've got to go follow workers' compensation claim and that is administrative, that is through the state of Texas, it's regulated. It is a whole other world from any type of lawsuit. If the employer does not have workers' comp, then it's considered a non-subscriber, they don't subscribe to workers' comp. You have to file a claim directly against the employer.The difference between a work injury non-subscriber claim and let's say, a car wreck case, is that a lot of times you file a lawsuit in a non-subscriber case and the employer has paid all their wages, has paid all their medical. They say, "What are you suing for?" Versus a car wreck where you're suing for past medical, future medical, impairment, all that stuff. Well, in a work injury case, that's essentially what you're suing for, is the intangibles, the mental anguish, impairment, pain and suffering, and if there's any evidence of future medical that is not covered by the employer or any difference

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