$425,000 Settlement for Elevator Mechanic Whose Hand Was Crushed in Pit

On December 27, 2023, an elevator mechanic was deep inside a New York City building's elevator pit, chipping away the concrete surrounding a 500-pound spring buffer during a full elevator renovation. The buffer had been rigged with a chain running fourteen floors up to a hoist on the roof, controlled by a remote the mechanic's assistant held above the pit opening. As the mechanic finished drilling and placed his right hand on the buffer to push himself up, the assistant engaged the hoist. A fraction of a second of resistance from the residual concrete gave way, and the buffer shot upward. His hand was trapped between the rising steel mass and the beam directly overhead.

He underwent emergency surgery the following day at Bellevue Hospital. Occupational therapy followed, and he eventually returned to work, though his orthopedic specialist documented permanent loss of hand function.

The defense built its case around a single factual dispute: the mechanic said he had told his assistant to hold the hoist until he was clear of the pit; the assistant said no such warning was given. The defense's medical expert reinforced this theory by downplaying the injury, noting minor range-of-motion limitations and surgical scarring while skipping any testing for the mechanic's primary complaint, grip weakness in his dominant hand.

Adam Moses Orlow, the firm's Senior Trial Partner, redirected the legal analysis away from the verbal dispute and onto New York's scaffold law. Under the statute and the Court of Appeals' controlling precedent, liability turns on whether an elevation hazard was properly controlled, not on what was said in the moments before an accident. A 500-pound counterweight accelerating upward inside a confined pit, with a worker kneeling at the bottom, falls squarely within the statute's reach. The firm's orthopedic expert documented the permanent functional loss the defense's doctor had not bothered to test for, shoring up the medical case. The firm recovered $425,000.