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Overview
As a Partner, Brian Raterman (he/him) concentrates his practice in workers’ compensation defense, civil defense, and subrogation. He also chairs Nyhan’s Appellate Department and its Charitable Committee.
Brian defends self-insured corporations, high-deductible organizations, small businesses, and insurance companies across all industries from initial investigation to appellate review in workers’ compensation cases. With over 10 years of experience in workers’ compensation and civil litigation, he has the skills to manage the most complex claims, including those that require a multi-prong defense approach. In high stake cases, he often defends clients in the workers’ compensation action, protecting their subrogation interests, and represents employers sued as third-party defendants in the Illinois Circuit Court.
As Chair of the firm’s Appellate Department, clients trust Brian to handle their litigation from the Illinois Workers’ Compensation Commission on review to circuit and appellate courts. His subrogation practice includes representing clients in multi-party mediation sessions and filing and prosecuting lawsuits against at-fault parties to achieve recovery.
In his practice, Brian prioritizes being a strong member of his client’s litigation team while working alongside the employer, claims handler, and other stakeholders to achieve the best result possible. To accomplish his client’s goals, Brian uses clear and concise analysis to important factual developments, legal-medical issues, liability, and exposure risks to develop the strongest defense strategy possible for any given case.
As the Chair of Nyhan’s Charitable Committee, Brian leads a dedicated team of attorneys and staff to identify and organize local opportunities for Nyhan to lend its support. He is always willing to discuss worthy causes with his clients. When he’s not at work, Brian can be found seeking out travel adventures, locally and around the world, with his wife and two young kids.
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Representative Matters
- Represented a client in multi-party mediation and pretrial sessions as both its workers’ compensation defense and subrogation counsel. The injured worker alleged medical malpractice following a work-related cervical fusion that left her completely incapacitated. The Injured Worker was receiving 24-hour in-home care and the client’s future exposures on this case were over $7 million dollars. Through an aggressive defense and universal approach, Brian resolved the workers’ compensation case for $1.00 alongside a waiver of its workers’ compensation lien.
- Represented a Chicagoland landscaping company in a workers’ compensation case involving a claim for medical bills of over $350,000.00 and future cervical fusion. Through extensive investigation, Brian uncovered the petitioner had used a false identity and filed a second workers’ compensation claim against another employer with a different name, butsought an award for many of the same medical and indemnity benefits. Brian secured an Arbitration and Commission decision that denied, the petitioner all benefits in his case. The facts of this case were so compelling it has been used as part of Arbitrator and Commissioner training at the Illinois Workers’ Compensation Commission in years since.
- Filed a civil complaint on behalf of a client acting as the subrogee of an injured worker seeking recovery of workers’ compensation benefits paid by the client to the injured worker. The injured worker had previously dismissed his lawsuit against the alleged at-fault party, so Brian received the referral just before expiration of the statute of limitations. Brian survived a motion to dismiss filed by the defendant and prosecuted the claim, leading to a recovery of nearly the full amount of benefits paid in the workers’ compensation less than a month before a jury trial was set to begin.