Union Laborer's Ten-Foot Fall From a Rolling Scaffold Settles for $9.9 Million

A union laborer was working from a scaffold on a New York City construction site in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. During the course of his work he fell off the scaffold, dropped about ten feet, and landed on the sidewalk below. He came down on his back and on his heel.

Both are difficult injuries for someone who works with his body. A laborer earns a living on his feet, lifting, carrying, and climbing, and a damaged heel paired with a back injury can close off that work for good. The fall left him facing years of medical treatment and an open question about whether he would return to the trade at all.

The Perecman Firm took the case. New York's Labor Law 240(1), the statute most people call the Scaffold Law, places the duty to guard against elevation falls on the owners and general contractors who control a job site, not on the worker who climbs the equipment. The laborer's claim was that he and his coworkers had no safe way to get on and off the scaffold. The attachable ladder that would have given them safe access had not yet been delivered, so they climbed up and down using the scaffold's horizontal rails as steps, and snow that day left the footing slippery. The firm's task was to show that this missing safeguard, not the laborer, caused the fall.

The trial court agreed. A New York County Supreme Court justice granted summary judgment that the owner and general contractor had violated Labor Law 240(1), and the Appellate Division, First Department, affirmed, which left only the amount of damages to be decided. The parties resolved that for $9.9 million before a jury heard the case, with the defendants' primary and excess insurers funding the agreement. VerdictSearch and the New York Law Journal recorded the result in their Top New York Settlements of 2014, where it stood as the second-largest settlement of any kind in the state for that year and the largest tied to a construction accident. David H. Perecman, who founded the firm, and Adam M. Hurwitz are the attorneys credited with the result.

Because the damages ended in a settlement rather than a jury verdict, no jury award was entered, and there was no trial award for an appellate court to reduce or to send back for a new trial. The $9.9 million is the amount the laborer received under the agreement.