Los Angeles construction accident lawyerComp is not your only claim.

Two claims after a site injury

We represent people hurt on a construction site in Los Angeles County, and the families of workers killed on one. The claim turns on the exclusive remedy rule, who besides your employer can be made to pay, the doctrine that decides claims against contractors and owners, the California data, the file kept by Cal/OSHA, the state workplace safety agency, the deadlines, and what a case is worth after the workers' compensation lien (the comp insurer's repayment claim). Wage claims, retaliation, and workers' compensation hearings are separate matters.

Two definitions matter throughout. Workers' compensation is a no-fault benefit system: your employer's insurer pays medical care and part of your lost wages whether anyone was careless or not, and in exchange you give up the right to sue that employer. A third-party claim is a negligence lawsuit against anyone who is not your employer.

Defendants in a construction case

In almost every case, not your employer. Labor Code section 3602(a) makes workers' compensation the sole and exclusive remedy against the employer. That is the exclusive remedy rule, and it is why a worker with a shattered ankle can be told, correctly, that there is no case against the company whose foreman put him there.

Section 3602(b) lists exactly three exceptions: a willful physical assault by the employer, an injury aggravated by the employer's fraudulent concealment of it, which reaches only the damages from the aggravation, and injury from a defective product the employer made and sold to a third person who supplied it back for the employee's use. None describes an ordinary site accident.

One statute sits outside that list. Labor Code section 3706 provides that if an employer fails to secure the payment of compensation, the injured employee may bring an action at law against that employer for damages as if the workers' compensation division did not apply. Where a labor broker pays cash and carries no coverage, that section is the whole case.

The two claims run at once and do not cancel each other. You take the treatment and the disability payments while the lawsuit is built, and the workers' compensation insurer is repaid out of the recovery. How that repayment works, and how much can be reduced, is on our page on third-party claims and workers' compensation.

Suing the contractor or owner

A commercial job site holds a dozen companies at once, and only one signs your check. The general contractor runs the project and coordinates the trades. A subcontractor is hired for one scope. A hirer is whoever engaged an independent contractor, usually the general contractor or the owner. Add the developer, the equipment lessor, the manufacturer, the utility, the public agency on a public job, and the delivery driver who backed into the trench. Every one is a stranger to your comp claim and a possible defendant.

Claims against the contractor or owner

This rule decides whether there is a case against the hirer. Under the California Supreme Court decisions beginning with Privette v. Superior Court (1993) 5 Cal.4th 689, a hirer who hands work to an independent contractor presumptively hands over responsibility for doing it safely. The exception is retained control: the hirer kept authority over how the work was performed, not merely over the result.

CACI No. 1009B, the instruction a Los Angeles jury is read, requires proof of four things: that the defendant retained some control over the contractor's manner of performance of the contracted work; that the defendant actually exercised that retained control; that the plaintiff was harmed; and that the defendant's negligent exercise of retained control affirmatively contributed to the harm. Retaining control and exercising it are separate elements, and both are required.

That makes a construction case a document case. The subcontract, the safety plan, the daily reports, and the text telling a foreman to keep going are what prove control was kept and used. A superintendent who set the sequence, supplied the scaffold, or sent a crew under a suspended load is not a bystander.

Other routes to the owner

Retained control is not the only theory. CACI No. 1009A covers an unsafe concealed condition, one not visible or whose danger is not apparent, where the owner knew or should have known and the contractor could not reasonably have found it. CACI No. 1009D covers the hirer who negligently provided unsafe equipment. Both sit in the same 2025 Judicial Council volume, and both survive full delegation.

Construction fatality data

California publishes its own figures, and they are worse for this trade than the national numbers. Cal/OSHA's Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries report, Fatal Occupational Injuries in California, published in April 2026, counted 419 workplace deaths statewide in 2024, down from a peak of 504 in 2022.

That report ranks construction second among California industries, with 81 deaths in 2024 and 765 between 2015 and 2024. The construction rate was 6.2 per 100,000 workers in 2024 and averaged 6.3 over those ten years, against a statewide average of 2.5. A California construction worker dies on the job at about two and a half times the rate of the state's workforce.

The mechanism matters as much as the count. Of the 81 construction deaths in 2024, 43 came from falls, slips, and trips, 17 from exposure to harmful substances and environments, 7 from transportation incidents, and 3 from violent acts. Statewide that year falls, slips, and trips killed 94 workers, construction workers were 43 of them, and 81 of the 94 were falls to a lower level. Our page on falls from heights and scaffolding covers that mechanism in depth.

The Cal/OSHA file

Cal/OSHA is the Division of Occupational Safety and Health inside the California Department of Industrial Relations, and it enforces the state's workplace safety rules, collected in Title 8 of the California Code of Regulations. Its page on reporting a workplace accident states the duty plainly: employers must immediately report any work-related death or serious injury or illness.

Immediately has a definition. Title 8 section 342 requires the report as soon as practically possible but no longer than 8 hours after the employer knows, and lists the ten items the call must contain, including whether the scene was altered. Section 330(h) defines serious injury or illness as one requiring inpatient hospitalization for other than observation or diagnostic testing, or in which an employee suffers an amputation, the loss of an eye, or any serious degree of permanent disfigurement.

The inspection produces the closest thing to a preserved scene anyone gets. An inspector arrives while the guardrail is still missing, photographs the anchor, measures the drop, and takes the names of the workers standing there. Within a month that crew is on other jobs.

There is a limit. Labor Code section 6304.5 provides that neither the issuance of, nor the failure to issue, a citation by the division is admissible in a personal injury or wrongful death action, except as between an employee and that employee's own employer. The same section bars division employees from testifying as expert opinion on how the standards apply, and makes Evidence Code sections 452 and 669 apply to the safety orders, the Title 8 rules, as to any other regulation.

The practical rule follows. The citation against the general contractor is not an exhibit in your case against it, but the Title 8 standard it broke is. The safety orders come in like any other regulation, proved through witnesses and records rather than the inspector.

Steps this week

1. Report the injury in writing. A text to the foreman with a date carries more weight than a conversation nobody remembers. The Division of Workers' Compensation warns on its page for injured workers that not reporting within 30 days can cost you benefits.
2. Ask for the claim form. The Division states on its how to file a claim page that your employer must give or mail you the form within one working day of learning about the injury.
3. Get examined the same day, and tell the doctor the injury happened at work. A gap between the accident and the first medical record is the first thing both insurers use.
4. Photograph the scene before it is rebuilt. Photograph the scaffold, the guardrail, the anchor, the ladder feet, the tag on the lift, and the serial plate.
5. Write down every company on that site, not only yours. Names on trucks, logos on hard hats, and the sign at the gate become the defendant list.
6. Ask in writing that the equipment be preserved. One email saying do not repair or discard the lift, the ladder, or the harness changes what an engineer sees.
7. Give no recorded statement yet. Insurance adjusters on both claims ask early, while you are medicated and guessing. You can decline.

We handle the recorded statement and track the dates on both claims. No fee unless we recover.

Immigration status

California law answers this directly. Labor Code section 3351 defines an employee for workers' compensation purposes as every person in the service of an employer under any contract of hire, express or implied, whether lawfully or unlawfully employed. Status is not a condition of compensation.

The lawsuit side is covered by two parallel statutes. Civil Code section 3339 and Labor Code section 1171.5 both provide that all protections, rights, and remedies available under state law, except a reinstatement remedy prohibited by federal law, are available to all individuals regardless of immigration status who have applied for employment or been employed in this state.

Both go further. For purposes of enforcing state labor, employment, civil rights, consumer protection, and housing laws, immigration status is irrelevant to liability, and no inquiry into it is permitted unless the party seeking it shows by clear and convincing evidence that federal immigration law requires the question. A defense lawyer who wants to ask about your immigration status must clear that bar first.

Filing deadlines

A statute of limitations is the outside deadline for filing a lawsuit, and it is unforgiving. Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1 gives you two years from the injury. A fatal accident adds a wrongful death claim on the same deadline, brought by the family members listed in Code of Civil Procedure section 377.60.

Construction injury damages

Workers' compensation pays medical treatment, temporary disability while you are off work, and a permanent disability rating converted into a schedule of payments. It pays nothing for pain, nothing for the trade you spent twenty years learning, and nothing for what your spouse now does at home.

The third-party claim is where those losses are recovered: past and future medical costs, full lost earnings and earning capacity, and non-economic damages. It is also where comparative fault applies, meaning a jury assigns each party a percentage and reduces your recovery by yours. A worker who used the wrong ladder still recovers, at a reduced number.

The workers' compensation insurer then seeks repayment. Labor Code section 3852 preserves your right of action and gives the employer a parallel claim. A workers' compensation lien is that insurer's right to be repaid out of your recovery. Section 3856 sets the order: litigation expenses and a reasonable attorney's fee first, then the employer's first lien on the balance. Section 3858 adds a credit against future benefits.

The lien is negotiated, not paid on receipt. The employer's own share of fault reduces what it may take, and the credit against future medical care is often the most valuable term in a settlement. We work that number as carefully as the gross recovery, because it decides what you keep.

Cases limited to workers' comp

Many construction injuries produce a workers' compensation claim and nothing else. These are the patterns with no lawsuit.

• Your own employer was the only careless party, on a site where the general contractor delegated the work and stayed out.
• The hirer kept control on paper but never used it. A safety clause in a subcontract is not exercised control, and Sandoval makes the exercise a separate element.
• The hazard was your own trade's to find. CACI 1009A reaches the owner for a concealed condition, not one your employer could have caught.
• The equipment worked as designed and was maintained. Product and lessor claims need a defect, not a bad outcome.
• The six-month government claim was missed on a public works job. The two-year statute does not rescue it.
• You were the general contractor's own employee, which makes it your employer, and the exclusive remedy rule applies to it as to a subcontractor.

One exception runs the other way. Where a company on the site should have carried workers' compensation and did not, Labor Code 3706 turns a dead end into a direct action, and Labor Code section 2750.5 makes a worker doing licensed contractor work presumptively an employee. Uninsured operators are common enough in Los Angeles residential work to check first.

Our process in construction cases

1. 1
   Treatment first

   We get you in front of the right doctors and keep utilization review, the comp insurer's treatment approval process, from stalling care. Nothing gets valued until the medical picture is settled.

2. 2
   Preserve the site and the machine

   Letters go out the same week to the employer, the general contractor, the owner, and the rental yard: hold the equipment, the daily reports, the safety plan, and the site video.

3. 3
   Prove control, not only carelessness

   We pull the permit history, the subcontracts, the sign-in sheets, and the Cal/OSHA file, then build the record CACI 1009B requires: the clause, the directive, and the inspection that never happened.

4. 4
   Settle the lien before you sign

   The gross number means nothing until the comp insurer's lien and its credit against future care are resolved, so that is negotiated alongside the recovery. The first offer arrives before treatment ends, which is why it is low.

Guides by type of construction accident

• Third-party claims and workers' compensation: who counts as a third party, and how the lien is resolved.
• Falls from heights and scaffolding: the 7 1/2 foot thresholds and the Title 8 scaffold rules.
• Crane, forklift, and heavy equipment accidents: certification, crane certificates, rental yard liability.
• Electrocution, arc flash, and burns: line clearances, lockout and tagout, and utility liability.

Related pages cover what a site injury becomes: catastrophic injury, brain injury, spinal cord injury, and premises liability. If you fell on a finished floor, start with slip and fall. Our recorded outcomes are on the case results page, the attorney profile of Josh Kohanim is on its own page, and general questions are answered in our FAQ. We also take these claims in Santa Ana, Woodland Hills, Calabasas, and Orange County.

Next steps

Against your own employer, almost never, because Labor Code 3602 makes workers' compensation the exclusive remedy and its exceptions are narrow. Against everyone else on that site, often, and that claim pays for the pain, the career, and the future care. The question is who besides your employer controlled the thing that hurt you.

Answering it takes documents you do not have: the subcontract, the safety plan, the daily reports, the equipment file, and the inspection. Get the claim on file, get treated, write down every company on that site, and let us obtain the rest.