Does Your Lien Have the Required Information?
Attorneys are rejecting liens that don’t comply with Illinois law. Ensure your lien meets all requirements and is served correctly. Watch the video to learn more!
Referenced Link:
Health Care Liens (article)
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Transcript:
Recently, we’ve received a number of phone calls from members who are having issues with attorneys accepting their liens. So we want to make sure that you don’t fall into one of the traps that we’re seeing again, and again. We have a number of our doctors who have maybe moved into Illinois and brought a lien form with them that they had from another state or they got a lien form from someone who is maybe a PI expert, but not necessarily a PI expert in Illinois.
What is really super important is you have to make sure that your lien form complies with the Illinois Health Care Lien Act. In other words, it has to have the required elements that Illinois law requires. If it doesn’t have those elements, then we’re seeing a trend where attorneys will actually discard those liens. You’ve got to make sure that one, your lien is in writing. Two you’ve got to make sure that the lien includes this list of things, it’s got to have the name and the address of the injured person, it has to have the date of the injury, it has to have the name and address of the health care professional, so you as the physician, it has to have your name and address. It also has to have the name of the party who is alleged to be liable for the injury. So either the company where it happened, or the person who created or caused or allegedly caused the car accident, it has to have their name also on that lien form.
So you’ve got to make sure all of those elements are required. One other thing when you are serving that lien, you’ve got to make sure that you serve according to the law, it has to be either served in person, or it has to be served through registered or certified mail. If you just send it through first-class mail that doesn’t actually meet the statutory requirements under the Illinois Health Care Lien Act. So you want to make sure that you send that registered or certified that’s what the law requires. Check out the rest of the information that’s in that article in our lien act article. Additionally, there’s a lien calculator to help you determine exactly the cost. All of that information is available to members, we want you to have that there’s also a downloadable lien template. So you can download that form and know that you have all of the required elements and then edit it according to your specific cases with the required elements. Don’t change the fields don’t remove any fields because that again would invalidate it, potentially and so you want to make sure that you continue to have valid links. Hopefully, this information helps you out and we’ll catch you next week.
