Saw injuries and tool-defect cases sometimes also involve product liability claims against the tool manufacturer.
The New York City and Vicinity District Council of Carpenters is the dominant carpentry union in NYC. Members work in framing, formwork, drywall installation, scaffold building, and finish carpentry. Union carpenters earn well — including substantial overtime — and the benefit packages are extensive.
In carpenter injury cases, we coordinate with the union benefits, document the full wage and benefit picture, and work with vocational experts familiar with the carpentry trades for return-to-work analyses.
Falls produce the catastrophic injuries — TBI, spinal cord injuries, complex fractures. Saw injuries produce amputations and lacerations that often end the carpenter’s ability to continue in the trade. Repetitive motion injuries develop over years and have their own analytical framework (occupational disease).
Carpenter cases often turn on scaffold and formwork details — the scaffold subcontract, the formwork engineering documents, the OAC discussions about formwork sequencing. A working developer reads these documents fluently. He recognizes when the formwork engineer’s specifications were not actually followed in the field; when the scaffold was reconfigured between phases without proper inspection; when the carpentry foreman raised safety concerns that didn’t make it to the GC’s attention.
Same categories as any New York personal injury case.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
In a typical negligence case, the defense will argue your case down with comparative-fault arguments — that you weren’t paying attention, that you took a shortcut, that you should have known better. Under §240, those arguments generally cannot defeat the claim. That is why §240 cases tend to settle higher and earlier than negligence-only construction cases.
