There is more than a little irony when a gain toward limiting runaway construction liability insurance cost in New York state—driven in part by creatively exaggerated injury severity—is counted because a jury awarded damages of less than a half million dollars at a time when those can be much higher. That’s just the way things are when it comes to New York insurance costs, courts and workers encouraged by law firms and medical practitioners to exploit the civil justice system. The lawsuit filed

in 2019 in state supreme court by carpenter Jose Luis Urquia against Deegan 135 Reality, Chess Properties, CGS Builders and Chess Builders, involved work with concrete forms.

He was directly employed by subcontractor Capital Concrete, which put him to work stripping forms from concrete in the basement of a Bronx building. In 2018, Urquia was standing on a ladder when a support or beam of some kind suddenly fell, and both Capital Concrete and Chess Builders recorded the incident in injury reports as a cut hand. When Urquia sued the companies the next year, it was learned that he had no experience stripping forms of this type.

Urquia was wearing a safety helmet and other needed personal protective equipment. He said when he was struck, he hit his back against a building column, but at that moment, it wasn’t yet clear that, as he also noted, “I had broken my hand.”

Somewhere along the line, what started as a cut and broken hand bloomed into a much more substantive shoulder injury that required surgeries. Court records show one 2020 surgery reported as a right arthroscopy to repair torn tissue. Two months later, medical experts testifying for Urquia said that they needed to perform anterior cervical disectomy and spinal fusion surgery to repair discs.

Skillful exaggeration of workplace injuries is hard for employers to overcome, but surveillance helped keep the damage award to carpenter Jose Luis Urquia within limits.

Several years of court pleadings passed before a jury trial was set for the Bronx, N.Y., courtroom. On June 9, an insurer for the defendants, Tradesman Program Managers, said a jury had awarded Urquia only $450,000—a “landmark” low damage verdict in a tough venue where plaintiffs had sought $4 million.

New York State lawmakers have considered legislation that would criminalize staged construction accidents, and Tradesman is suing workers, law firms and medical providers for racketeering in numerous personal injury cases.

While skillful exaggeration of real injuries like Urquia’s is hard for employers to overcome, video surveillance of workplaces will help. When no site cameras can be used, non-work surveillance is becoming an option. Private investigators several times in 2022 followed Urquia from his Westchester County home to local soccer fields where he was observed playing on the field, including one time, according to Tradesman, even heading the ball. The video no doubt affected the outcome. While this case may not amount to the landmark victory that Tradesman sees, it is an important lesson of how hard it can be to stop claims from less severe injuries being blown up to win huge damages.