After a site injury the compensation claim starts almost by itself: the employer reports it, an insurer opens a file, and treatment gets authorized. It feels like the system working, and for a minor injury it is.
For a serious one it is half the picture. Workers’ compensation pays nothing for pain and replaces only part of your wages, and you cannot sue your employer for the rest. But you can sue anybody else who contributed — and on a construction site, almost everyone present works for somebody else.
Who else can be responsible
The people to identify are the ones who are not your employer:
- The general contractor, for site safety and coordination between trades
- Another subcontractor, whose crew created the hazard that injured you
- The property owner, depending on the degree of control retained over the work
- Equipment manufacturers and suppliers, where a machine, a lift or a tool was defective or unguarded
- Maintenance and rental companies, where equipment was serviced or supplied in an unsafe condition
- Engineers and architects, in design and structural failure cases
- Delivery and trucking companies operating on site
This matters most on the biggest injuries, because that second claim covers pain and suffering and full lost earning capacity, and because a compensation insurer will generally have a right to be repaid out of whatever you recover — which makes how the third-party case is handled directly relevant to what you keep.
The injuries that recur on Maryland sites
- Falls from height: scaffolding, ladders, roofs, unguarded edges and open floor openings
- Struck by: falling tools and materials, swinging loads, moving plant and vehicles
- Caught in or between: machinery, collapsing trenches, vehicles and fixed structures
- [Electrocution](/personal-injury-lawyer/electrocution-lawyer/): contact with overhead lines, live circuits and inadequate lockout procedures
- Trench and excavation collapse, which is frequently fatal and almost always preventable
- Crane, hoist and lift failures
- Fires and explosions, including gas and confined-space incidents, causing serious burns
- Structural and building collapse
The resulting injuries are the catastrophic ones: brain and spinal injury, amputation, crush injuries to hands and multiple fractures.
How safety rules are used
Federal and state workplace safety regulation sets requirements for fall protection, trenching, scaffolding, machine guarding and electrical work. A violation is not automatically the same thing as legal liability, but it is powerful evidence of what a careful contractor should have done, and inspection findings after a serious incident become part of the record.
Equally important is what the site’s own paperwork shows: the safety plan, toolbox talks, inspection logs, the hazard that had been raised and not fixed. That documentation exists on well-run sites and its absence is itself telling.
What to do after a site injury
- Report it to your employer promptly and in writing, which the compensation claim depends on.
- Get medical attention and say it happened at work.
- Photograph the scene and the equipment before anything is moved, which on an active site can happen within hours.
- Write down every company on site, not just your own. This is the single most useful thing you can do for the second claim, and it becomes almost impossible months later.
- Keep your own copy of anything you are asked to sign.
- Do not give a recorded statement to another company’s insurer before getting advice.
A note on immigration status
Workers sometimes do not report a site injury because they are afraid of what will happen to them. It is worth saying plainly: injured workers have rights, and we speak with people in Spanish and Korean about their situation in confidence before they decide to do anything.
If you are unsure whether you can bring a claim, ask us rather than assuming. The conversation is free and confidential and commits you to nothing.
Two sets of deadlines
The compensation side requires prompt written notice to your employer and a separate, longer deadline to file with the Workers’ Compensation Commission.
The third-party claim follows the ordinary Maryland injury timeline, generally three years, and much shorter where a government body owns the project. Because it is the claim nobody mentions, it is the one most often discovered late.
