A roof in Hancock, a school addition in Springfield, a warehouse slab in Westfield, a bridge deck on the Pike. The work is dangerous in ways the paperwork never quite captures, and when it goes wrong it goes wrong badly: falls from height, crush injuries, struck-by loads, trench and scaffold collapses, burns, electrocutions. The person who gets hurt is usually the one furthest down the contracting chain and the one with the least paper protecting him.
We handle construction injury cases across the region from our offices in Springfield and Westfield. A new injury intake reaches a real person 24 hours a day at (413) 426-8657, and the first conversation is free.
You probably have two cases, not one
The first is workers' compensation, against your employer's insurer. It pays reasonable and necessary medical treatment and a share of your lost wages, and it pays whether or not anyone was careless, including when the injury was partly your own doing. That is the trade the system makes: no fault to prove, and no claim against your employer beyond the benefits. Our workers' compensation page covers how that side works and where it goes wrong.
The second case is against everyone who is not your employer. It is an ordinary negligence case, and it pays what comp never does: pain, disfigurement, lost earning capacity beyond the comp schedule, and the loss your spouse and children suffer. On a construction site there are almost always other companies present, which is why this second case is missed more often on job sites than anywhere else. The comp checks start arriving, the paperwork feels handled, and nobody asks the second question.
When both cases exist they have to be run together. The comp insurer carries a repayment right against a third-party recovery, and how that lien is negotiated changes what actually reaches you.
What the SJC's Skyway Roofing decision changed
In August 2026 the Supreme Judicial Court decided Suquilanda v. Skyway Roofing, Inc., and it narrowed one route to the general contractor. Two things came out of it.
General responsibility is not retained control. A contract clause requiring the general contractor to keep the premises safe, or a general right to direct and stop work, is not enough on its own. The standard from Corsetti v. Stone Co. still governs: a general contractor that retained the right to control safety on the site, including the right to initiate and maintain safety measures and programs, answers for failing to exercise that control with reasonable care. What the Court wanted and did not find in Skyway was express safety language paired with concrete safety conduct, a supervisor who inspected fall protection, directed crews on safety, or stopped unsafe work.
Naming yourself general contractor on a permit does not create a duty. The Court held that a State Building Code obligation cannot manufacture a duty of care that does not otherwise exist, though it can bear on breach once one does.
The practical effect is not that these cases are gone. It is that they are decided on the record, early, on a summary judgment motion. Defense counsel will argue every file looks like Skyway. The answer is a file that looks like Corsetti, and that file gets built in the first weeks, not on the eve of trial. Attorney Wayne Peereboom, who handles these cases from our Westfield office, wrote about the decision in detail after Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly asked him what comes next.
Who can answer for a job site injury
- The general contractor, where the contracts and the conduct show retained control over safety.
- Other trades on site. The crew whose rigging, excavation, or debris created the hazard owes you the ordinary duty of care. Nothing about Skyway touches this.
- The property owner, where the owner set the safety procedure rather than leaving it to the contractors.
- Equipment manufacturers and suppliers. A lift that failed, a saw that shipped without a guard, a defective harness or anchor, a scaffold assembled by a rental company.
- Drivers and trucking companies, in work zones and on deliveries.
Each has separate insurance, and the sorting between them is the first hour of the first conversation.
The evidence decides it, and it does not wait
Contracts, permit files, safety plans, daily logs, sign-in sheets, inspection records, and video are the entire retained-control fight. They also disappear on their own schedule: video overwrites in days, subcontractors close out jobs and box up files, memories of who said what at the morning briefing fade within a month. A preservation letter from a law firm changes the obligation to keep them.
If OSHA inspected, the file is a useful early record of what was found and who was cited. It is not proof of your case, and OSHA penalties are paid to the government rather than to you, but it fixes facts in place while everyone still remembers them.
Deadlines
Massachusetts generally gives three years to file a personal injury suit, and the workers' compensation side has its own notice and filing deadlines that run much sooner. Claims involving a city, a town, or a state agency, which describes a good share of the road, bridge, and school work in this valley, carry shorter notice requirements and their own limits. Which deadlines apply to you depends on who was on the site, and it is worth getting that answer in week one rather than year two.
What to do now
Report the injury to your employer in writing and get the medical care you need, all of it, and keep going until you are done treating. Photograph the scene and the equipment if you or someone you trust safely can. Write down who was on site, which companies they worked for, and who saw what happened. Keep your gear, your harness, your boots, exactly as they are. Do not give a recorded statement to any insurer for another company on the site before you have talked to a lawyer.
Then call. If comp is being paid properly and no third party is in the picture, we will tell you that, free, in the first conversation. If there is a second case, the work on it starts the same week.