Off The Record – Workers’ Comp – Construction Accidents

Video Transcript

Craig: Hi, everybody. Good afternoon. My name is Craig Rosasco and this is William Turley. We are both partners at the law firm of Turley, Redmond, and Rosasco, with various offices located throughout the downstate and upstate now, we’ve infiltrated that market. We’re here today to talk about construction accidents, and when an individual gets hurt at work, while on a construction site. We see it happen all the time, and certainly, your first avenue of pursuit in monetary and medical benefits is through the workers’ compensation system. However, if there was a third party that may have been liable for your injuries, or responsible or negligent in causing your injuries, you do have a viable potential lawsuit against either a building owner, a property owner, and/or a general contractor. We see it all the time here, and we’re here to talk about it today. Bill, have you seen this happen in our industry? Well, we’ve all seen it happen. How often do you see it and what do you typically see?

Bill: Very often, very often. Usually people in the trades who get hurt on a construction site, plumbers, carpenters, electricians. You know, and construction sites usually involve a number of parties. You have a general contractor, you have an owner, you have other trades that are on the construction site that are doing what they do. A classic example would be like, let’s say the electrician is carrying a spool of wire on his shoulder and he’s walking across the construction site, and the carpenter has left a big hole in the floor, and they just put a tarp over it, and he doesn’t see it, and he steps through the hole in the floor and gets badly injured, there are a multitude of parties that he can bring a negligence action against, that electrician, okay? Because keep in mind, workers’ compensation covers you for your lost wage benefits and your medical care. And if you have a permanent loss of wage-earning capacity as a result of that accident, you can collect those benefits from workers’ compensation, right?

Craig: Correct.

Bill: But if you have a lawsuit in connection with that injury, there’s a multitude of things that you can go after, pain and suffering. Your spouse can take part in the lawsuit for loss of services. If perhaps you can’t do things that you used to be able to do or excel at, let’s say you are a great tennis player or a golfer and you can no longer do that, you can bring that into your lawsuit. And so there’s so many more things that you can explore in a negligence action than you can in workers’ compensation.

Craig: We see it all the time, absolutely. And the most important part is getting counsel involved in early, in the claims process, because there is a significant interplay between the workers’ compensation case and also the lawsuit. There are building codes and are safety violations that are built into the law to protect workers. And it’s our job to decipher which codes apply and which codes have been violated, because it can lead to a very substantial recovery. So if you’ve been involved in a work-related construction site accident, call us now, 631-582-3700 is the main office, but we’ve got satellite offices throughout the state. So don’t be hesitant to call us if you’re outside of the immediate jurisdiction that we’re telling you from. We’re here to help you and we’re here to coordinate your life and advise you as to what’s the best avenue to pursue. So please call us.

Bill: And you can check us out on the web at www.nydisabilitylaw.com.

Craig: Good point, William.

Bill: Thanks for listening.