A serious workplace injury changes the arithmetic of a household in a single afternoon. The wages stop, the medical bills start, and the paperwork arrives from people whose job is to close the file. Our New York work injury lawyers represent people hurt on job sites, in warehouses, on loading docks, and inside buildings across New York City, Queens, and Long Island.
The Perecman Firm PLLC has recovered nearly a billion dollars for injured people and their families. We built that record on the cases other firms treat as routine and on the ones that turned out to be far more than workers' compensation claims.
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.
Table of contents
- What Happens After a Work Injury in New York?
- Who Can Be Held Responsible for a Workplace Injury?
- Workers' Compensation and the Claim It Does Not Cover
- When a Work Injury Becomes a New York Labor Law Claim
- Why Injured Workers Across New York Call The Perecman Firm
- Injuries We See Most Often on New York Job Sites
- How Long Do I Have to Act After a Work Injury?
- FAQs Answered by a New York Work Injury Lawyer
- Talk With a New York Work Injury Lawyer
What Happens After a Work Injury in New York?
Two separate legal processes can open after a New York work injury, and most injured workers only learn about one of them. The first is workers' compensation, a no-fault system that pays medical treatment and partial wage replacement through your employer's insurance carrier. The second is a personal injury claim against someone other than your employer, which covers compensation for pain, suffering, and full lost earnings. A personal injury lawyer can help you understand how this separate claim may apply to your situation.
Workers' compensation moves first and moves fast. Your employer's carrier assigns an adjuster, schedules an independent medical examination, and begins building a record about how badly you were hurt and for how long. That record follows you.
The second process often never opens at all, because nobody tells the worker it exists. A laborer who falls through an unguarded floor opening files a comp claim, collects two-thirds of his average weekly wage, and never learns that the general contractor had a nondelegable duty to cover that hole. The comp claim closes. The real claim was never filed.
That gap is the reason this page exists. A job injury lawyer in NYC should be looking at both tracks from the first conversation, because the deadlines, the defendants, and the money are different on each one.
Who Can Be Held Responsible for a Workplace Injury?
Your employer usually cannot be sued, but almost everyone else on a New York job site can be. Under Workers' Compensation Law section 11, compensation benefits are the exclusive remedy against your employer, which means you generally cannot bring a negligence case against the company that signs your paycheck. The exclusive remedy rule stops there. It does not protect anyone else.
On a typical construction or renovation project in New York, the people working around you answer to several different companies. Each one is a potential defendant if its negligence contributed to what happened to you.
- The property owner, including building owners, developers, and managing agents
- The general contractor or construction manager running the site
- Subcontractors employed by someone other than your employer, including electrical, plumbing, demolition, and steel trades
- Equipment owners and rental companies responsible for a defective hoist, lift, saw, or ladder
- Manufacturers of a machine with a removed guard, a defective safety interlock, or an inadequate warning
- Drivers and trucking companies delivering material to the site
- Municipal and utility entities, which carry their own separate notice requirements
Identifying which of these companies had control over the condition that hurt you is investigative work, and it usually has to start before the site changes.
Workers' Compensation and the Claim It Does Not Cover
Workers' compensation pays medical care and a portion of lost wages, and it pays nothing for pain and suffering. Understanding whether workers’ compensation pay for pain and suffering can help clarify what benefits are and are not available. That single sentence explains why two workers with the same injury can end up in very different financial positions.
Comp benefits in New York are calculated from your average weekly wage and your degree of disability, subject to a statutory maximum. They do not account for what the injury did to your ability to lift your child, sleep through the night, or return to the trade you spent 15 years learning. They also do not account for the earnings you lose above the statutory cap.
A third-party claim covers what comp leaves behind. It reaches full past and future lost earnings, medical costs beyond what the carrier authorized, and the human damages that no benefit schedule measures. The two claims run alongside each other, and the comp carrier will assert a lien against a third-party recovery, which is one of the reasons the two cases should be coordinated rather than handled in isolation.
The New York State Workers' Compensation Board administers the benefits side. We handle the side the Board does not reach.
When a Work Injury Becomes a New York Labor Law Claim
If you were hurt doing construction, demolition, excavation, repair, alteration, painting, or cleaning work, New York gives you protections that exist in almost no other state. These are the Labor Law sections, and they change what you have to prove.
Labor Law section 240(1),known as the Scaffold Law, applies to elevation-related and gravity-related risks. It requires contractors, owners, and their agents to furnish scaffolding, hoists, ladders, slings, braces, and similar devices constructed and placed to give proper protection. Understanding the dangers of working on scaffolds can help explain why these safety requirements are important. Owners of one and two-family dwellings who contract for but do not direct or control the work are excepted.
Labor Law section 241(6) works differently. It imposes a nondelegable duty on owners and contractors, but a claim under it has to be anchored to a specific, concrete provision of the New York State Industrial Code. A general safety complaint is not enough, and neither is an OSHA citation. OSHA is a federal enforcement scheme, and while an OSHA citation can be useful evidence, it is not an Industrial Code violation, and it cannot serve as the predicate for a 241(6) claim.
Labor Law section 200 codifies the common-law duty to provide a safe place to work. Claims under it generally require showing that the defendant supervised or controlled the work, or had notice of a dangerous condition.
Which section applies is not a labeling exercise. It determines whether comparative fault can reduce your recovery, what the defense will argue, and how the case is valued.
Why Injured Workers Across New York Call The Perecman Firm
We are a New York injury firm built around serious cases, not volume. Construction and New York Labor Law work is the center of what we do, and work injury cases sit directly alongside it, because so many of them turn out to be Labor Law cases that nobody identified. We also understand the importance of taking steps to prevent an accident at a construction site before a serious injury occurs.
What that means in practice:
- We look for the third-party claim from the first call, before the site is cleaned up and the equipment is returned
- We handle the comp claim and the third-party case as one coordinated strategy, including the carrier's lien
- We know the difference between an Industrial Code provision that supports a claim and one that courts have found too general, and we plead accordingly
- We prepare cases to be tried, which is what changes the number a defendant is willing to discuss
- We work with Spanish-speaking and Polish-speaking workers, and we handle immigration-status questions the way New York law actually treats them
Our record includes nearly a billion dollars recovered for injured people and their families across New York. If you want to know what your situation looks like before you commit to anything, that conversation costs nothing.
Injuries We See Most Often on New York Job Sites
The injuries that bring workers to us tend to come from a short list of mechanisms that repeat across job sites from Manhattan high-rises to warehouse conversions in Queens.
- Falls from ladders, scaffolds, roofs, and unguarded edges
- Falls through uncovered floor openings, shafts, and skylights
- Falling objects, including material dropped from upper floors and loads released from cranes and hoists
- Crush injuries from heavy equipment, vehicles operating in reverse, and collapsing material
- Machinery injuries involving removed guards, modified safety devices, and unexpected startup
- Electrocution from live circuits, damaged cords, and contact with overhead lines
- Trench and excavation collapses
- Back, spinal, and nerve injuries from lifting, repetitive strain, and sudden load shifts
The mechanism matters legally, not just medically, because it often determines which Labor Law section applies and which safety regulation was violated.
How Long Do I Have to Act After a Work Injury?
The deadlines run separately on the comp side and the lawsuit side, and they do not run the same length. On the workers' compensation side, Workers' Compensation Law section 18 calls for notice to your employer within 30 days of the accident, and section 28 requires the claim to be filed with the Board within two years of the accident, or within two years of disablement in occupational disease cases.
Both provisions contain excuse and exception language, and occupational disease, latent conditions, and certain exposure claims follow their own rules. Personal injury lawsuits against third parties run on a different statute entirely, and claims involving municipal entities or public authorities carry much shorter notice requirements that can be measured in months rather than years.
Because these timelines vary with the facts, the defendant, and the type of claim, our workplace injury attorneys do not publish a single deadline that covers every case. The practical answer is to have someone review the specific dates in your situation early, while every option is still open.
FAQs Answered by a New York Work Injury Lawyer
These are questions injured workers ask us regularly, and the answers below are general information rather than advice about your particular case.
Can I file a lawsuit if I already accepted workers' compensation?
Yes, in many situations. Accepting comp benefits does not waive a claim against a third party who caused your injury. The two proceed together, and the comp carrier will assert a lien against any third-party recovery, which is something to address deliberately rather than discover at the end.
What if my employer says I was an independent contractor?
That label does not control the outcome by itself. New York looks at the actual working relationship, and misclassification is common in construction. It can also work in your favor, because a worker who truly is not an employee may not be barred by the exclusive remedy rule at all.
Does it matter that I was partly at fault?
It depends on which claim you are bringing. New York uses comparative fault in most negligence cases, which reduces recovery in proportion to your share of responsibility rather than eliminating it. Certain Labor Law 240(1) claims are treated differently, and that distinction is often worth a great deal.
My employer has no workers' compensation insurance. What now?
Uninsured employers lose part of the protection the exclusive remedy rule normally provides. New York maintains a fund for workers in that position, and an injured worker may have options against the employer directly that would otherwise be unavailable.
Will filing a claim cost me my job?
Retaliating against a worker for filing a workers' compensation claim is unlawful in New York. That does not mean it never happens, and if it does, it is a separate issue worth raising with us promptly.
What should I do in the first few days after getting hurt?
Report the injury to your employer in writing, get medical treatment, and tell the provider it happened at work, and photograph the location and equipment if you safely can. Write down the names of everyone who saw it. Job sites change quickly, and the conditions that caused your injury may be gone within a week.
How much does it cost to talk to a work injury lawyer?
Nothing. We review work injury cases at no charge, and we handle these cases on a contingency basis, which means our fee comes out of a recovery rather than out of your pocket.
Talk With a New York Work Injury Lawyer
If you were hurt at work, the most useful thing you can do right now is find out whether your case is only a comp claim or something considerably larger. That answer depends on facts that are easiest to preserve early.
The Perecman Firm PLLC represents injured workers throughout New York City, Queens, and Long Island. Call (212) 977-7033 or contact us online to talk through what happened. We will listen, explain where you stand, and tell you honestly what we think is worth pursuing.