Perecman Firm Settles Scaffold Fall Case Against New York City for $4.2 Million

In 2018, a 23-year-old construction worker fell from a scaffold on a New York City job site. The lawsuit that followed, Cardona v. City of New York, took its name from the injured worker, who brought the claim as plaintiff. He was near the start of his working life when the accident happened.

The fall caused multiple injuries. In the span of a few seconds, a young man who had been doing physically demanding construction work was left dealing with the aftermath of a serious accident.

Height-related construction injuries in New York are governed in large part by the state's Labor Law. Section 240, the provision often called the scaffold law, holds property owners and general contractors strictly responsible for giving workers proper protection when they work at height. When a required safety device is missing or fails and a worker falls, the law assigns the responsibility to those parties rather than the worker. The suit named the City of New York and other defendants as the parties answerable for conditions on the site. Tort claims against the City also carry their own procedural hurdles, including strict filing deadlines and notice requirements that a plaintiff has to clear before a case can move forward.

The Perecman Firm, P.L.L.C. represented the injured worker. David H. Perecman and Carissa M. Peebles handled the matter. Their job was to establish that the parties in control of the site had not supplied the protection the law required and that the failure was connected to the fall and the harm that came with it.

In June 2018, the case settled for $4.2 million. Because the parties reached an agreement, the claim resolved before a jury returned a verdict. There was no trial award, so nothing was cut or remitted on appeal.

The result drew attention from the publications that track the state's largest civil recoveries. The New York Law Journal placed the $4.2 million figure at number 7 on its 2018 list of top settlements. TopVerdict, an independent verdict and settlement reporting service, listed the Cardona settlement among the top personal injury settlements recorded in New York that year and identified David H. Perecman and Carissa M. Peebles as the attorneys of record.