Arizona Construction Accident Lawyers

A construction site is never run by one company. A general contractor manages the schedule. A dozen subcontractors handle framing, electrical, plumbing, and steel. A separate crew operates the crane. An equipment rental company owns the scissor lift. When one of them cuts a corner and someone gets hurt, the person hurt is often an employee of only one of those companies, and workers’ compensation only reaches that one.

That gap is where a construction accident claim lives. It doesn’t replace workers’ comp. It runs alongside it.

Workers’ Comp Isn’t the End of the Story

Arizona’s workers’ compensation system makes your employer’s insurance carrier pay medical bills and a portion of lost wages, regardless of fault, and in exchange, ARS 23-1022 makes comp your exclusive remedy against that one employer. You generally can’t sue your own employer for negligence on top of a comp claim.

That exclusivity doesn’t extend to anyone else on the site. ARS 23-1023 gives an injured worker the right to pursue a separate claim against a negligent third party, a general contractor who isn’t your direct employer, another subcontractor’s crew, a site owner, or a manufacturer, while still collecting workers’ comp benefits.

The carrier that paid your workers’ comp benefits also holds a lien against whatever you recover from the third-party case, a form of subrogation. That lien gets resolved out of the settlement, not out of your pocket separately. AZ Law Now handles the third-party claim itself. We don’t advise on or handle the workers’ compensation claim against your employer.

Who Else Can Be Liable

The general contractor holds overall responsibility for site safety on most Arizona projects, coordinating trades, enforcing safety protocols, and inspecting conditions. When a GC misses a hazard that its own contract required it to catch, it can be liable even to workers it doesn’t directly employ.

Other subcontractors are common defendants too. A crane operator employed by one company who drops a load on a worker from a different company. An electrical crew that leaves a line energized when a different trade is told it’s safe to work near it. Each answers for its own crew’s conduct, not for your employer’s.

Property and project owners can be liable under premises liability principles when a dangerous condition on land they controlled caused the injury, separate from any contractor relationship.

Equipment manufacturers face liability when a defective scaffold, lift, power tool, or fall-arrest lanyard fails and causes an injury that has nothing to do with how the crew used it. Architects and engineers can be liable when a design defect, not a construction error, created the hazard. And utility companies answer for buried or overhead lines that weren’t properly marked, de-energized, or coordinated with the excavation crew working near them.

Common Causes of Construction Site Injuries

OSHA’s Construction Focus Four training identifies falls, struck-by incidents, electrocutions, and caught-in or caught-between hazards as the categories responsible for the majority of serious construction injuries nationally.

Falls happen from scaffolding, ladders, roof edges, and unprotected floor openings, usually when fall-protection equipment is missing, unused, or improperly anchored. Struck-by injuries happen when a worker is hit by falling tools or materials, or by a vehicle or piece of heavy equipment operating on an active site. Electrocutions happen from contact with overhead power lines or improperly de-energized circuits. Caught-in and caught-between injuries happen in trench collapses and when equipment traps or crushes a worker between two objects.

Most of these trace back to something specific and provable: a missed daily inspection, a skipped tailgate safety briefing, a guardrail that was removed and never replaced, equipment that wasn’t maintained on schedule. That evidence disappears fast on an active site. Photographs, incident reports, and the identity of the crews working nearby all matter, and they matter most in the first days after the injury.

Comparative Negligence With Multiple Companies on Site

Arizona follows pure comparative negligence under ARS 12-2505. If you were partly at fault, your recovery gets reduced by your percentage of fault, but it’s never barred entirely, even at a high fault percentage.

Construction sites often involve more than one potentially liable company, which raises a second Arizona rule: ARS 12-2506 abolished joint and several liability for personal injury claims. Each defendant generally pays only its own share of the fault a jury assigns it, not the whole judgment. There are narrow exceptions, including when parties acted in concert. Sorting out who owed what duty, and how much of the fault belongs to each company on a multi-contractor site, is usually the central fight in a construction accident case.

The Deadlines That Apply to Your Case

The baseline deadline is two years from the date of the injury under ARS 12-542. If a public entity, a school district, a city, a county, or a state agency, commissioned the project, ARS 12-821.01 requires a notice of claim within 180 days of the injury, with a one-year deadline to file suit after that. Arizona courts enforce the 180-day notice strictly, and missing it can bar an otherwise valid claim.

If you’re also a workers’ comp claimant, remember the separate one-year window under ARS 23-1023 to control the third-party case yourself. These deadlines can overlap and interact differently depending on your role on the project and who’s involved, which is exactly why an early case review matters more here than on a simpler injury claim.