In most situations where you’ve been injured at work by a falling object, your lawsuit involves one filing. In that filing, you name all those entities liable to you and you file in the correct New York Supreme Court. Some situations are different, though. For example, if you attempted to sue the state government in a Supreme Court for your construction injuries, your lawsuit would not succeed. You must file that lawsuit in a special court, but you must still pursue all other liable entities in a regular civil court case. Confused? Don’t be discouraged. There are a lot of mandatory procedural technicalities that exist in New York court procedure, and that’s one reason among countless others why you should rely on a knowledgeable New York City construction injury attorney to help you get the compensation you need and deserve.
C.P. was a worker who found himself in that kind of procedural situation. He worked on a demolition project where his duties involved removing windows. One of those windows tipped and struck C.P. in the face. What made C.P.’s case less than typical was that he was working on a project at the state prison in Attica. The owner of his job site was the State of New York, but the general contractor on the project was a private firm.
New York law says that, if you have a claim for damages against the state government like C.P. had, you must sue the state in a special court called the Court of Claims. That’s very noteworthy because the Court of Claims has its own rules about many procedural things. Those rules, for example, say that you only have 90 days to file your lawsuit against the state and also to serve notice of that lawsuit on the state Attorney General.