🟥 Why the Lawyers Are on the Buses (And Why That Doesn’t Mean You Can Still Sue

Nov 2

3 min read

Image of bus with slogan on side panels 'no win' no fee' aimed at attracting injured workers to seek a lawyer.

The legal illusion at the heart of workers’ compensation and why most people never discover it until it’s too late.

If you can still sue, why are there lawyers on every bus and why does the road they promise never lead to a courtroom? "

Because in NSW workers’ compensation, the presence of lawyers does not mean workers still have full legal rights.

It means the system funds lawyers to keep people inside the statutory scheme, not to take employers to court.

And most injured workers are never told the difference.

What workers think the ads mean

“If anything goes wrong, I can still sue my employer.”“No win, no fee means I have full legal protection.”“If they deny my treatment, I’ll get a lawyer and they’ll sort it out.”

That would be true if workers’ compensation worked like any other area of law. But it doesn’t.

What the lawyers are actually funded to do

Most of the lawyers advertising on buses are not paid to sue employers.

They are paid through ILARS grants, legal funding issued by the Independent Review Office (IRO) to represent injured workers inside the workers’ compensation scheme, not in court.

They can help with claims, reviews, medical disputes, weekly payments.

They are not funded to run a negligence lawsuit in the courts.

They cannot unlock full damages unless the worker passes a medical threshold most never reach.

So the ads are technically true but structurally misleading.

You have a lawyer. You do not have access to the courts.

The hidden barrier: The impairment gate

Yes, workers can still sue their employer for negligence, but only after they pass a permanent impairment threshold.

In NSW:

You must first stay inside the workers’ comp system
You must be medically assessed as 15% whole person impaired (physical)
The NSW Government has proposed raising the bar for psychological injury to 31% WPI
Only then can you pursue a “work injury damages” claim and even then, only for economic loss (no pain & suffering)

So the right still exists on paper, but it has been designed out of reach in practice.

That’s why the buses are covered in ads. The courts are not.

The result: A legal system that looks like protection, but isn’t

Workers assume:

lawyer = access to justice

The truth is:

lawyer = funded navigator inside a system that removed most of your rights before you ever spoke to them

There is a difference between:

having a lawyer and having legal power

And nobody tells injured workers that at the beginning. No mandatory disclosure. No informed consent. Just a bus ad and a belief in a right that has already been traded away.

This is not an attack on lawyers

Many plaintiff lawyers care deeply about what has happened to their clients. They fight hard inside the limits the State has imposed. They worry about their clients and they come out swinging when further rights of workers' are attempted to be eroded by political pressure.

They are not the architects of those limits, they are working in a system built by decades of political trade-offs, where governments repeatedly bowed to insurer pressure, Treasury priorities, and business lobbyists.

The result?

The injured person has the least power in the system designed for them
The right to sue was restricted long before most workers were even born
Lawyers now operate in a legal landscape where recovery is capped, rights are narrowed, and access to court is gated

This isn’t about blaming lawyers.It’s about naming the structure: