One of the things that New York City is most famous for is buildings. There are buildings in the area that are known all over the world. Of course, among the famous ones, there are others that are known only to those who walk the streets of the city and encounter those buildings in their day-to-day lives. One thing that all of the buildings have in common is that they started out as construction projects. When something goes wrong with one of them, there may be construction litigation.
One basis for litigation is the claim that a building has construction defects that result in ongoing problems and are directly attributable to one or more of the individuals or companies who were involved in the construction process. A construction defect is legally defined by each state, and definitions tend to include defects in the design, workmanship, materials or systems of a project when any of those result in the failure of any part of a building or other structure in a way that causes damage to either persons or property.
Naturally, there are disagreements between the owners and occupants of a building and those who are responsible for its construction as to whether or not any given problem can be characterized as a construction defect. The resolution of those disagreements determines who will pay to fix the problem, and doing so can often be extremely expensive. Some construction defects can be found and identified quickly, since they are obvious to people conducting inspections, including inspections that are done during the construction process. Those are called patent defects.
There are also latent defects, however, which are defects that are concealed and thus may not be discovered until they start causing readily apparent problems. In both cases, those pursuing litigation about the defects can benefit from the advice of an experienced attorney.
Source: Modern Contractor Solutions Magazine, “What is a Construction Defect?” Jessica J. Alley, accessed Nov. 8, 2017
