West Palm Beach Construction Accident Lawyer
You went to work on a site and came home in an ambulance, and workers compensation is not going to cover what this actually costs. We can take it from here. Call 833-370-8692 for a free consultation. You pay us nothing unless we win. Our West Palm Beach personal injury lawyers have taken these cases across Palm Beach County since 1993.
Construction Accident claims in West Palm Beach
The general contractor, the sub and the equipment owner will each say it was one of the others, and the site will look different tomorrow. Meanwhile you are on a check that does not cover the rent, with surgery ahead and no idea when you work again. Finding who else owes you beyond compensation is our job, and it starts the day you call.
A good share of the construction injuries arising here happen on roadway projects along the I-95 and Okeechobee Boulevard corridors rather than on buildings. Those sites involve contractors working under state or county contracts, which raises questions an ordinary site does not: whether the traffic control plan was followed, whether the maintenance-of-traffic setup matched the approved drawings, and whether the government body itself has any exposure. A claim against a public entity is capped by sovereign immunity and requires written notice before suit, so identifying the defendants early is not optional.
A Palm Beach County construction injury generally produces both a workers’ compensation claim through your own employer and a negligence claim against another company on the site, which pays for pain and lost earning capacity. Where a project is under a state or county contract, a public body may also be involved, and that route cannot be pursued until written notice has been presented and answered, and recovery from a public body is capped.
What to do after a construction accident in West Palm Beach
- Report the injury to your employer, and note the date you did it. Florida requires an injured worker to report a workplace injury to the employer, and the period for doing it is short. Say it to a supervisor, and follow it with a text or a message so there is a record of the date. Injuries reported late are disputed on that ground alone, and a message sent the same afternoon closes the argument before it starts.
- Write down every company that was on the site. Not only who employs you. The general contractor, the other trades working that day, whoever owned or operated the equipment, the delivery driver, the crane or hoist company, the property owner. Photograph the signage at the gate and the logos on the trucks. Your employer is generally the one party you cannot sue in negligence, so the names that matter most are the other ones.
- Photograph the scene and the equipment before it changes. A site is different by the next morning. The ladder gets put away, the opening gets covered, the scaffold moves up a level and the trench gets backfilled. Photograph the thing itself, the guardrails or the ones that were missing, the tags and inspection stickers on any equipment, and the wider area so it is clear what a person could actually see.
- Get treated, and understand who is directing the care. Go to the hospital if you need to. After that, workers’ compensation generally directs treatment to physicians the carrier authorizes, which is a real constraint and not a suggestion. It is worth having somebody explain how that works before you are unhappy with it, because the process for changing an authorized physician has its own rules and its own timing.
- Immigration status does not decide whether you have a claim. Florida’s workers’ compensation statute defines an employee to include workers whether they are lawfully employed or not, and a negligence claim against another company on the site does not turn on status either. Workers are told the opposite constantly. One thing genuinely is worth care: anything to do with documents given to an employer should be discussed with a lawyer before it is discussed with anybody else.
Where these happen in West Palm Beach
Construction in this county divides between roadway and utility work in the public right of way and residential building on private land, and the two run on almost entirely different rules.
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Underground and utility work
Trenching, boring and utility installation, which produces the most serious injuries per hour worked of anything on this list.
- Protective systems, and whether the one used matched the soil classification that was actually there
- Utility locate tickets, which record what was marked before anybody dug and by whom
- Strikes on gas and electrical services, where the locate record is the whole case
- The utility owner, the locating contractor and the excavator, which are three separate companies
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Night work and lighting
A great deal of roadway and utility work in this county is done overnight, which changes what anybody can see.
- Temporary lighting levels, which are measurable and are frequently below what a plan required
- Workers on foot alongside live traffic at speed, separated by cones rather than by barrier
- Shift records and fatigue, which are documented in time sheets
- Reflective equipment provided or not provided, which is a records question rather than an argument
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Estate and gated community building
The residential work across the eastern and central county, on private land with a homeowner in the chain.
- A homeowner, a general contractor and several trades, each with different insurance
- Small crews with no written safety program, where the absence of records is itself the answer
- Association rules and access restrictions that shape how a site is set up
- Permit and inspection history, which on residential work is often the only paper trail there is
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Agricultural and equestrian structures out west
Barns, stables and agricultural buildings around Wellington and beyond, which are built and maintained differently from anything on the coast.
- Structures erected without the inspection regime a commercial building carries
- Machinery and equipment on private land, frequently owned by somebody other than the employer
- Long distances to definitive care, which is geography rather than negligence and has to be separated out
- Almost no camera coverage, which puts the weight on physical evidence and on the maintenance file
What causes them
- Material and tools falling on people working below, and on people passing on the street
- Being struck by vehicles, equipment and swinging loads on an active site
- Trench and excavation collapse, where the protective system was absent or was the wrong one for the soil
- Contact with overhead power lines and with temporary power that was not properly grounded
- Crane, hoist and rigging failures, including loads that were never within the chart
The injuries we see, and what each one turns on
Crush and orthopedic injuries
Pelvis, femur, tibia and complex joint fractures that need hardware and then a second operation to remove or revise it. In a trade that is paid for physical work, the question is rarely whether somebody recovers but whether they recover enough to go back to the same job, which is a different and much larger loss.
Amputation and hand injuries
Saws, nail guns, presses and caught-in injuries. Losing fingers or a hand ends a career in most of the trades, and the claim has to be built around what somebody can earn afterward rather than around what the surgery cost.
Burns and electrical injury
Contact with overhead lines and with temporary power produces injuries that are worse than they look at the roadside, because the damage runs along the path the current took. Cardiac and neurological effects can appear later, and the treatment runs to skin grafting and months of rehabilitation.
What Florida law requires you to prove
Compensation against your employer, and what it does not pay
Workers’ compensation under Chapter 440 pays medical care and a portion of lost wages regardless of who was at fault, and in exchange it is generally the exclusive remedy against your own employer under Fla. Stat. § 440.11. What it does not pay is anything for pain, for what daily life has become, or for the full value of a career that has ended. It also has its own deadlines, starting with the requirement in Fla. Stat. § 440.185 that the injury be reported to the employer promptly.
The claim beside it, against everybody else
A construction site is a set of separate companies, and the exclusive remedy protects only your employer. Another subcontractor, an equipment owner or manufacturer, a crane or hoist operator, a delivery company or the property owner all remain answerable in ordinary negligence, and that claim does pay for pain and for lost earning capacity. Florida does extend the employer’s immunity to a general contractor in defined circumstances under Fla. Stat. § 440.10, which is precisely why the contractual structure of the site has to be established rather than assumed. Most Florida negligence claims arising on or after March 24, 2023 carry a two-year deadline under Fla. Stat. § 95.11.
What the federal safety rules do and do not do
Construction work runs under the federal standards in 29 CFR Part 1926, including the fall protection requirements in 29 CFR § 1926.501, which generally require protection at six feet in construction. A violation does not by itself create a right to sue, and a citation is not a verdict. What it does provide is a documented standard against which conduct is measured, and a federal investigation file that would not otherwise exist. Employers also have to report a workplace fatality within eight hours and an amputation or in-patient hospitalization within twenty-four under 29 CFR § 1904.39, which fixes a date and generates records.
The full statutory detail, and the parts that differ by claim type, sit on our statewide construction accident page rather than being restated in every market.
How we prove it in Palm Beach County
The first question in a Palm Beach County case is whether the site was under a public contract, because a public defendant changes the timetable completely and a private one does not.
- The contracts between the owner or agency, the general contractor and every subcontractor
- Utility locate tickets and the markings record, which decide most underground strike cases
- Approved plans and drawings, and the daily inspection records showing what was actually built
- Daily reports, superintendent logs and site photographs for the date in question
- The safety program, toolbox talk sign-in sheets and job hazard analysis for the task
- Equipment inspection records and the equipment itself, preserved before it is repaired or returned
- Any federal safety investigation file, and the employer’s reporting of the injury to the agency
- The written notice to the agency and to the state where a public body may be responsible, filed inside the statutory period
The notice is the item on that list with no second chance. Where a city, the county or a state agency may share responsibility, it goes out early and in writing, before anybody is certain the claim will be pursued.
Who would handle your case
Being hurt in West Palm Beach is hard enough without working out the legal side on your own. The trial lawyers below have handled construction accident claims across Florida since 1993, and one of them will take yours from the first call to the last check. They will tell you what your case is worth and why, and they will be straight with you about the parts that are hard.
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Richard P. Pravato Founding & Managing Attorney Board Certified in Civil Trial Law by The Florida Bar since 2004, and by the National Board of Trial Advocacy. Injury cases exclusively since 1996. Full profile → -
Brett J. Yonon Senior Trial Attorney Selected to Florida Super Lawyers in 2024 and 2025. Brett Yonon is who this firm puts on a catastrophic injury or a death in the family, and he has tried those cases to verdict. Full profile →
How insurance companies handle these claims
Two carriers are usually involved from the start and they want different things. The compensation carrier is managing a claim it has to pay whatever happened, and the liability carrier for another company on the site is deciding whether it has any exposure at all.
- You are an independent contractor, so there is no coverage
- What decides it is the actual working relationship rather than what the paperwork calls it: who controlled the work, who supplied the tools and materials, whether you worked for anybody else. Florida treats the question more strictly in construction than in other industries. Where the classification was wrong there may be coverage after all, and where there genuinely is none, a straight negligence claim against the employer becomes possible instead.
- The equipment is repaired, returned or put back in service
- A ladder, a scaffold component, a hoist or a piece of plant can be repaired or sent back to a rental company within days, and once it is gone nobody can examine it. A written request that it be preserved costs nothing and can go out in the first week. Sent late it becomes an argument about what was destroyed rather than a finding about what failed.
- A recorded statement, asked for early and asked for often
- Both carriers will want one and the questions are about what you were told, what you were wearing and what you have done before. You are not obliged to be recorded by a liability carrier for another company, and the answers given in the first week by somebody on pain medication get quoted back months later as considered testimony.
What a claim can include
Lost earning capacity in a trade
The real loss in construction is rarely the weeks off. It is a person who can no longer carry, climb or kneel doing work that requires all three, and who has to earn a living somewhere else. That is quantified by a vocational assessment rather than by a pay stub.
Life care costs after a catastrophic injury
Equipment, home modification, attendant care and the replacement schedule for all of it, set out by a professional so that it is a number rather than an argument.
What the compensation carrier takes back
Where both claims exist, the compensation carrier generally has a right to be repaid out of a third-party recovery. How much it actually recovers is negotiable and is governed by a formula rather than by the invoice total, and handling it properly is a meaningful part of what an injured worker ends up with.
Why Wolf & Pravato in West Palm Beach
A Palm Beach County construction case is filed in the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit in West Palm Beach, and the firm’s office on Vista Parkway is in the county rather than across it. These claims run on records held by contractors, utilities and agencies here, and proximity is what makes that routine rather than a project.
Board Certification in Civil Trial law is the Bar’s own measure of trial experience, and 861 of Florida’s 109,000-plus lawyers hold it. Richard Pravato has held it since 2004. It is the credential that changes how an adjuster reads a file, because it says the case has somewhere to go if they will not pay it.
Asking costs nothing and there is no fee unless we win. If we look at what happened and think the claim is not worth pursuing, we will say so on the first call instead of signing you up.
West Palm Beach construction accident questions
I was hit in a work zone. Is the contractor or the county responsible?
It can be either, and it is decided by who controlled the condition that caused the crash. A contractor that departed from the approved traffic control plan is liable in ordinary negligence with no cap. A public body responsible for the design or the approval is capped and requires written notice before suit. The approved plan and the daily inspection records are what separate the two, and both we can get.
The trench collapsed. Is that automatically somebody’s fault?
Not automatically, but it is one of the more provable failures in construction, because the protective system required depends on the soil and the depth and both are documented or should have been. What a case looks at is what system was in place, whether it matched the conditions, and who decided. Where a service was struck rather than a wall collapsed, the locate ticket record is usually the whole answer.
It was a small residential crew with no paperwork at all.
That absence tends to help rather than hurt. Where there is no safety program, no hazard analysis and no record of any instruction being given, the argument that a worker chose to ignore what was provided has nothing behind it. What still has to be established is who controlled the site and the condition, which on residential work comes from the permit file, the contracts and the homeowner’s own records.
Does an OSHA citation prove my case?
It helps and it we can get, but a citation is not the same as civil liability and its use is subject to rules of evidence. Its greater value is often in what the underlying investigation documents, and in establishing a pattern where the same company has been cited before.
I am getting workers comp. Can I still bring a claim?
Against your employer, generally not. Against anyone else who contributed to the injury, yes, and that claim is not barred by the comp system. On a multi-contractor site there is very often such a party. It also pays for pain and suffering, which comp never does.
The questions that come up on every kind of claim, deadlines, fees, recorded statements and fault, are answered on our Florida injury claim FAQ.
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Tell us what happened
A lawyer will listen, tell you what Florida law does with those facts, and be straight with you about whether it is worth bringing. We are at 2101 Vista Parkway, Suite 4500, West Palm Beach, FL 33411.