Lawyers for Ceiling Collapse Lawsuits

In the immediate wake of a ceiling collapse, it can be hard to know where to turn, particularly if you feel that you’ve already exhausted all your resources. In one case that Block O’Toole & Murphy eventually settled for $2,250,000, our client had called her superintendent, the building management office, 311, and the upstairs neighbor whose leak was causing the water damage (who responded that she had also been trying to alert the building)—all before her ceiling fell in.

As this story demonstrates, the typical ceiling collapse doesn’t occur in isolation: multiple parties may be responsible for such an incident, and the incident itself is often symptomatic of greater problems that jeopardize the safety and well-being of tenants. The attorneys at Block O’Toole & Murphy recognize that effectively litigating a ceiling collapse lawsuit means gaining an understanding of the community in which such cases occur. Read on to better understand our approach and how we can help you navigate your own ceiling collapse case.

Need to Know:

• Ceiling collapse cases demand early, thorough, and up-close investigation.
• Establishing notice is key to many ceiling collapse cases.
• Retaining an attorney with strong trial skills and significant ceiling collapse experience can help you to obtain the results you need.

In This Article:

• Who Is Legally Responsible for a Ceiling Collapse?
• Notice in Ceiling Collapse Cases
• Investigating a Ceiling Collapse Case
• Case Study: $2,300,000 for Brooklyn Man Whose Bathroom Ceiling Collapsed
• Case Study: $5,850,000 for Home Health Aide Injured in Kitchen Ceiling Collapse
• Attorneys With Strategic Trial Tactics to Enhance Results

Who Is Legally Responsible for a Ceiling Collapse?

According to Article 301 of the New York City Construction Codes, the owner of a building or property is responsible for ensuring the maintenance of a building and keeping it up to code.

It’s possible, however, that additional parties may be liable in your ceiling collapse case. Repairpersons or contractors hired to fix ceiling issues may be held liable if their actions caused or contributed to the incident. In some cases, the construction companies who worked on the building may be liable for failing to comply with New York State standards and regulations relative to construction.

For an example of how liability may play out, suppose a flood occurs in an upstairs apartment. The landlord sends personnel to stop the flood. They perform repairs in a shoddy manner, which leads to a ceiling collapse on the floor below. The landlord in this case is still responsible: having been put on notice of the damage, he failed to ensure a successful repair. However, the repairpersons he contracted will also likely be a defendant party in the case. An experienced attorney will be able to sort through potentially liable parties in your case and give you insight into what avenues are worth pursuing.

Importance of Establishing Notice in Ceiling Collapse Cases

Types of Notice

Ceiling collapse cases depend on the ability to establish “notice”—that is, evidence which shows that a responsible party was aware, or should have been aware, of his or her responsibility to address a hazard. Notice can be of two kinds: actual or constructive.

• A case involves actual notice if evidence shows that a responsible party was aware of the hazard and failed to address it within a reasonable amount of time. If you observe a significant crack in the plaster of your ceiling and call your landlord to tell him about it, your landlord has actual notice.
• Constructive notice exists in cases where a defendant should have known about the hazard, regardless of whether he or she disclaims knowledge—for instance, if the hazard is prominently visible in a public area where the defendant walks every day.

Proving Notice

Because ceiling collapses tend to occur in private areas such as rooms in an apartment, they are more likely to involve actual notice than constructive notice. Although it might appear more simple than constructive notice, the process of proving actual notice can quickly become complex. The victim may have given notice in person or through an unrecorded phone call, rather than by text message or email, meaning that no paper trail exists. It may even happen that the person to whom the victim gave notice is let go by building management and cannot be located.

If such complications arise in your case, a good attorney will take steps to establish notice through careful deposition and investigation. In an effort to prove actual or constructive notice, we often retain experts in building construction and maintenance to examine the scene of a ceiling collapse and give an opinion, based on the remaining portion of ceiling and debris and any available photographs or prior repair records, about how long the ceiling condition would have been visibly dangerous prior to the incident. Additionally, we take our own knowledge of ceiling collapse—gained through extensive experience in this case area—with us to deposition. By sharply observing a defendant’s responses and knowing the right questions to ask about ceiling maintenance and repair, an attorney with well-developed cross-examination skills may be able to prove notice when deposing the superintendent or landlord.

It’s important to understand that actual notice need not come from the plaintiff. If other residents of the building notified your landlord about the same water leak that damaged your ceiling, for example, your landlord has actual notice—regardless of whether you yourself were among the notifiers.

Investigating a Ceiling Collapse Case

Ceiling collapse cases often require rapid, targeted action. When a ceiling collapses in a residential building, it’s important for attorneys and investigators to speak to other residents who have the power to provide important context about the details of the incident—particularly where they themselves are affected by the same factors that caused the damage. They may testify as to who was aware of the damage or its cause, what type of notice the owners of the premises received, and what repairs (if any) took place.

Traveling to the accident scene allows us to witness the details of the case. If we do not have the opportunity to see the elements that led to the accident firsthand, we work to find other ways of confirming the details. For example, if we are told that a particular roof area in the building leaks when it rains but did not have the opportunity to witness the leak ourselves, we will often send an investigator to take a video of the leak on the next rainy day.

Once an investigator has confirmed the source of the collapse, he or she may take the additional step of calling someone from the building to report the damage, just as a resident would. The time it takes for such a complaint to be addressed—or not—can powerfully reveal the lived experience of building residents. These actions not only offer us crucial perspective on the case but enable us to effectively communicate our client’s situation to a jury if the case should go to trial.

Case Study: $2,300,000 For Brooklyn Man Whose Bathroom Ceiling Collapsed

In ceiling collapse cases where notice is clear, it is not unusual for a landlord or superintendent to invoke reasonable opportunity to repair, a defense tactic alleging that the accident occurred before the person put on notice had time to remedy the problem. 

We contended with this factor in several of our largest ceiling collapse settlements, one of which involved a young man who was injured when a bathroom ceiling collapsed. The man, 25 years old at the time of the incident, lived with his parents and older sister. He told us that about two weeks before his accident, his mother and sister had both complained to their superintendent about a water leak in their bathroom ceiling. Upon an initial inspection of the bathroom, the superintendent denied the presence of the leak. However, the leak worsened, and our client filed another complaint a week later. Inspecting again, the superintendent acknowledged the leak and, with the help of a plumber, made a temporary repair using cardboard.

Over the weekend, our client asked the superintendent when he would make the permanent repair. The superintendent said that he would do it on the following Friday. On Tuesday, however, the ceiling collapsed on our client. He suffered a neck injury which required a surgical discectomy, as well as fusion surgery.

The superintendent at first insisted that he had taken reasonable action within the time he had been given. Such a defense might have been convincing to an audience unfamiliar with the standard challenges faced by landlords in New York City, but our handling attorneys—partners Jeffrey Block and Joseph Donahue—had enough experience with similar cases to understand how dangerous his “fix” actually was. The ceiling of our client’s bathroom had been made from sheetrock, a substance notorious for becoming heavy and prone to collapse if it absorbs water. Because this defect is a common problem in New York City apartment buildings, a responsible landlord is aware of how it must be addressed: by quickly taking down any portion of the sheetrock that is wet.

Armed with this knowledge, Donahue took a careful deposition of the superintendent. His pointed questions revealed that the superintendent was aware, not only of the dangers of wet sheetrock, but of the fact that the ceiling was wet in two separate places. When Donahue asked him whether he could have dismantled the sheetrock ceiling or requested that the plumber do so, he admitted that he could have, and did not. He further admitted that, while it had been the plumber’s idea to make the repair with cardboard, he did not question the decision based on what he knew about sheetrock, and that he made no effort to warn the family against going into the bathroom after the temporary repair was made. Notably, he admitted that he was responsible for taking care of big and small complaints around the building and said in as many words that he had regarded this incident as a “big complaint.” It was clear from his statements that he had failed to treat the incident with the seriousness that he knew it deserved.

Despite this clear evidence of negligence, our attorneys dealt with an additional challenge from the defense. Our client had been in a motor vehicle accident several years earlier, in which he had also injured his neck. The defense attempted to claim that his neck injury was attributable to the prior accident, rather than the ceiling collapse.

Block and Donahue met this defense by comparing the results of the two accidents. Following the motor vehicle accident, our client had undergone minimal medical care before returning to work and had no limitations on his daily activity. After the ceiling collapse, however, he required ongoing medical treatment and was impeded from the job search he had been undertaking at the time it occurred.

Based on this evidence, our attorneys moved toward trial, claiming exacerbation of our client’s pre-existing condition. However, as they were preparing to begin jury selection, they were able to settle the case for $2,300,000 on our client’s behalf. The settlement ensured our client’s ability to pay all medical expenses related to his neck surgery, the successful outcome of which allowed him to return to his job search.

Case Study: $5,850,000 for Home Health Aide Injured in Kitchen Ceiling Collapse

Another case that Block and Donahue handled occurred within an even shorter time frame, with a still narrower window of opportunity for repair on the part of the landlord. Our client was a 44-year-old home health aide who, on the evening prior to her accident, had reported a leaking kitchen ceiling to her superintendent. He quickly inspected the apartment above hers and told her that the damage had been caused, not by a leak, but by the upstairs tenant’s attempts to wash the floor with water from a bucket. He promised our client that he would return the next day to fix the damage.

The next day, however, as our client was preparing Easter dinner, her ceiling collapsed, striking her and causing injuries to her head, neck, and back. She continued to work in the year following this accident, but suffered chronic pain that necessitated multiple surgeries and eventually prevented her from doing her job.

The defendant argued that he was not legally responsible because he took immediate action on behalf of our client. However, as in the previous case, our investigation revealed that our client’s ceiling had been made from sheetrock, and deposition revealed that the superintendent was aware of the proper methods for dealing with wet sheetrock. Not only had he made no move to dismantle the ceiling, but he had even failed to take the basic action of cutting a hole in the sheetrock to allow leaking water to pass through without being absorbed.

Retaining an expert medical witness who could testify as to the permanency of our client’s injuries and how they were likely to progress over time, Donahue and Block were able to settle the case on behalf of the client for $5,850,000.

Attorneys with Strategic Trial Tactics to Enhance Results

Ceiling collapse cases often rely on proving notice—whether through careful investigation or through successful deposition, which requires the same mindset as the trial skill of cross-examination. It is important to retain an attorney who handles your case with the possibility of trial in mind and will therefore overlook nothing. The attorneys at Block O’Toole & Murphy are adept trial lawyers who use their skills to ensure the best results for their clients, both in and out of court.

Besides the cases previously mentioned, our track record of successful ceiling collapse settlements also includes:

• $2,250,000 for a client who was struck by a portion of the ceiling that fell while she was sleeping
• $1,450,000 for a 25-year-old Brooklyn renter who suffered neck injuries after a portion of the ceiling collapsed and knocked her down while she was showering
• $1,000,000 for a 38-year-old mother of four who was struck by a portion of the ceiling that collapsed in her kitchen, causing her to fall to the floor

Block O’Toole & Murphy’s attorneys serve all five boroughs of New York City as well as the entirety of New York State. Contact the attorneys at Block O’Toole & Murphy to receive a free legal consultation by calling 212-736-5300, or by filling out our online contact form.