New York City Construction Accident Lawyers

New York protects construction workers more forcefully than almost any other state, and insurance carriers have spent decades learning how to work around those protections. A New York construction accident lawyer earns their fee in the gap between those two facts. Our firm has been trying, and resolving, these cases since the practice began.

The Perecman Firm PLLC represents construction workers hurt on job sites across New York City, Queens, and Long Island. We have recovered nearly a billion dollars for injured people and their families, and construction and New York Labor Law work is the center of what we do, rather than one item on a list.

Injured on the job in NYC, Queens, or Long Island? The Perecman Firm PLLC handles serious work accident cases. Call (212) 977-7033 for a free consultation.

Why Do New York Construction Cases Work Differently?

Because the New York Labor Law shifts responsibility onto the parties who control the money and the insurance, rather than the ones who swung the hammer. The Scaffold Law was passed while New York was building its first skyscrapers, and workers were dying at a rate the city could not ignore. Owners and general contractors had no financial incentive to ensure proper safety. The Legislature gave them one.

The practical consequence today is that your claim is usually not against your employer at all. Workers' compensation is the exclusive remedy against the company that pays you, while the building owner, the general contractor, the other trades, and the equipment companies remain fully answerable in a separate personal injury lawsuit. That lawsuit is where the real compensation lives.

What Does Labor Law 240(1) Actually Require?

Labor Law section 240(1) requires owners, contractors, and their agents to furnish and properly place safety devices for work involving elevation and gravity-related risk. Scaffolding, hoists, stays, ladders, slings, hangers, blocks, pulleys, braces, irons, and ropes are all named in the statute.

A claim generally needs five things: a covered activity, a gravity-related risk, a defendant who is an owner, general contractor, or their agent and is not your employer, a safety device that was absent or inadequate, and a causal link to your injury.

What makes the section powerful is the absence of comparative negligence. A defendant cannot reduce your recovery by arguing you were careless; it has to prove you were the sole proximate cause, and where the statute was violated, that is close to impossible. Understanding the causes of accident on construction site can help put that defense theory and the circumstances of the accident into context.

There is still a persistent belief that these cases are simple. A worker falls off a ladder; the worker wins. Carriers have been defending these claims for decades, and they know precisely what they want an accident report and a site witness to say.

The reach of the statute has also grown. In Runner, an 800-pound steel reel descended only a few stairs and pulled a worker horizontally into a metal bar. He did not fall, and nothing struck him. What mattered was the weight, the distance, and the force generated, which the court treated as a physically significant elevation. In Wilinski, an object standing on the same level as the worker toppled onto him, and that was enough, because it was heavy enough to generate a significant force.

With falling objects, our NYC construction accident attorneys work through the same sequence every time. Was the object being hoisted or secured at the time? If not, should it have been secured given the work being done? Then the question that decides the case: which device would have prevented it, and why was it not there? Answering those questions is often central to establishing blame after a construction accident.

What Work Does the Scaffold Law Not Cover?

Plenty, and the boundaries are where good cases get lost by people who assume the statute covers anything that happens on a job site. The distinctions are technical and they matter.

• Routine maintenance is not repair. Changing a light bulb is maintenance. Pulling the whole fixture, installing a new one, and running wire is a repair, and it is covered. Servicing a machine for normal wear and tear is maintenance.
• Alteration requires a significant physical change to the building or structure. A subcontractor who drills through a wall, opens it up, and runs wire to install a satellite dish is altering the building. One who simply mounts the dish may not be.
• Decorative work generally falls outside the statute. Hanging seasonal decorations is the standard example.
• Cleaning depends on scale. Commercial window washing and project-scale cleaning can qualify. Routine, recurring, household-type cleaning does not.
• Investigatory inspections separate from the construction phase may not be covered, including someone who inspects a site before work begins and falls through a hole.

One thing we no longer tell clients is that there is a minimum height. Courts increasingly look at the facts of the individual case rather than applying a threshold, which is exactly what Runner and Wilinski reflect.

How Is Labor Law 241(6) Different From 240(1)?

Labor Law section 241(6) addresses hazards that have nothing to do with height, and it works only when anchored to a specific provision of the New York State Industrial Code. It also behaves differently in one important way: comparative fault applies, so your own conduct can reduce the award.

It is worth correcting a misconception we see repeated online, including in places that should know better. Section 241(6) does not apply only to employers. It reaches employers, owners, contractors, and their agents, even though many individual Industrial Code provisions are phrased as commands directed at the employer. In practice, the defendants are the owner and the general contractor, because an injured worker cannot sue their own employer.

The code provisions that support these claims fall into recognizable families, and the New York State Department of Labor maintains the rules themselves.

• Electrical requirements covering grounding, capping, covering wires, and powering down
• Tripping hazards from tools, materials, and debris
• Slipping hazards including water and grease
• Hazardous openings and holes that require covers or ramps
• Scaffold requirements including guardrails and toe boards
• Guarding on power saws and other powered equipment

Over the years, courts have found more and more of these provisions specific enough to support liability, which is why a claim pleaded well in 2026 may survive where an older one would not.

One distinction we hold firmly, because getting it wrong damages cases: an OSHA citation is evidence. It is not an Industrial Code violation, and it cannot serve as the predicate for a section 241(6) claim. Labor Law section 200, meanwhile, covers the general duty to provide a safe place to work and usually turns on supervision, control, or notice.

A Case the Defense Said Was Our Client's Fault

Our client was the signal man for a crane lift at a New York job site when a steel beam struck him. A personal injury lawyer can evaluate the defense theory, which was straightforward: he stopped watching the load after he gave the signal, turned his back, and caused his own injury.

What the investigation actually established was a chain of failures that had nothing to do with him.

• The load traveled out of the crane operator's field of vision
• The tag lines meant to stabilize the load were too short, so it swung and rotated without control
• The operator was a trainee who was not monitoring his load display, which would have shown the weight spiking the moment the beam snagged on a beam already installed
• He kept pulling, and the cable snapped
• The trainer responsible for watching the load did not watch it and did not call a stop, and received a Department of Buildings violation for the accident

The court granted summary judgment for our client on liability. Under the Labor Law, there is no comparative negligence, so the defense would have had to prove he was the sole cause. With an unmonitored load display, tag lines that were too short, and a trainer who failed to stop the lift, that argument had nowhere to go.

Why Handling the Comp Claim and the Lawsuit Together Matters

An injured construction worker usually has three separate claims running at once, and the way they interact decides outcomes. There is the workers' compensation claim against the employer, the third-party Labor Law suit against the owner and general contractor, and sometimes a Social Security Disability claim. Understanding how to file a construction accident claim is important because each type of claim has its own requirements and may affect the others.

We handle all three in-house, including our own appeals, which many New York firms send to appellate boutiques. Clients do not experience these as three claims. They had an accident, they have one life, and they want someone to deal with the complications rather than explain them.

The strategic reason it matters is less obvious. New York courts are slow, and construction cases commonly run three to five years, with complex ones running five to seven. Meanwhile, the compensation carrier is pushing to classify permanency and cut off benefits, including medical, often around a year past the last surgery.

If the medical gets cut off, the client stops treating. Then mediation arrives, and defense counsel says the client has not been treated in three years, so how badly could they have been hurt? 

Keeping the compensation medical claim open prevents that argument, and a firm holding only the lawsuit has no way to protect it. An outside compensation firm can also have its own reason to settle quickly for its fee, which can quietly damage the third-party case. The New York State Workers' Compensation Board handles the benefits; coordinating them with the lawsuit is our job.

What Happens in the First 30 Days

The first priority is not evidence. It is whether the client can eat and get treated, because many construction workers live paycheck to paycheck, and compensation benefits do not always start on time. Getting those benefits moving comes first.

The investigative work runs in parallel and cannot wait.

• Identify and reach witnesses, and take signed statements while memories are fresh
• Send an investigator to photograph and measure the scene before it changes
• Locate surveillance footage before it is overwritten
• Serve preservation demands for equipment, video, incident reports, safety materials, sign-in data, and communications
• Identify defendants and deadlines, including notice of claim requirements for municipal and public entities such as the City, the Transit Authority, the School Construction Authority, and the Port Authority, where deadlines vary by entity, and 90 days from the accident is the shortest and most common
• File public records requests with federal OSHA, the NYC Department of Buildings, and other agencies
• Run ownership searches and pull the DOB job file, which usually identifies the general contractor and yields permits
• Subpoena the employer early for contracts, work logs, safety meeting records, progress photographs, and accident reports

When we speak to a witness in that first week, we are not simply learning what happened. We already know what we have to prove, so we know which questions about the project, the equipment, and the instructions will surface in motion practice years later. Those first conversations are frequently what win the case.

Why Injured Workers Choose The Perecman Firm

Other firms handle construction accident cases. Very few live in this area of law the way we do, and that shows up in which cases we are willing to take.

What that means for a client:

• We take borderline and contested Labor Law cases that other good firms have turned down, and we have changed the law on appeal after losing at the trial level
• We handle 5 to 10 appeals a year ourselves, rather than sending them out, and new decisions circulate and get argued internally every week
• We prepare cases to be tried, which is the leverage that moves a carrier, whether or not the case ends in a courtroom
• We keep the compensation, third-party, and disability claims under one roof so nothing falls between them
• We work with Spanish-speaking and Polish-speaking workers, a connection that goes back to the earliest days of the firm

Our results include nearly a billion dollars recovered for injured people and their families. If another firm has already told you there is no case here, we would like to look at it ourselves.

FAQs Answered by a Construction Site Accident Lawyer in New York

These are the questions injured construction workers ask us most, answered as general information rather than advice about a specific case.

Talk With a New York Construction Accident Lawyer

The evidence that decides a construction case tends to disappear quickly. Sites get cleaned, equipment gets returned, and video gets overwritten, often within days of the accident.

The Perecman Firm PLLC represents injured construction workers throughout New York City, Queens, and Long Island. Call (212) 977-7033 or contact us online. Tell us what happened, and we will tell you honestly what we think can be built from it.