They Told You You Don't Need a Lawyer. Their Own Marketing Tells You Why.

Here is a question worth answering before you read the rest of this article.

Who has a better outcome, a New York construction worker who retains an attorney and pursues a Labor Law § 240 claim, or a worker who is told he does not need an attorney, is treated by an on-site medic, and processes his injury entirely through his ADR program?

The lawyered worker wins, and it is not close.

The reasons why are in the materials the ADR programs and their insurance carriers publish about themselves. You do not have to take a personal injury lawyer's word for any of this. Every claim in this article is supported by direct quotes from the programs that promote ADR, the insurance brokers that sell it, the state agencies that administer it, and the academic research that has studied it. The story the proponents tell about themselves, read carefully, is the story of a system built to reduce one specific kind of recovery for workers, and they are explicit about it in the materials they produce for employers and brokers, just not in the materials they put in front of you.

The ADR Programs' Own Words

Start with the marketing.

Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, a California broker that places construction workers' compensation policies, publishes promotional material on its website. The article title is direct: "ADR Workers' Compensation Programs Reduce Litigation." It is also Episode 137 of their podcast under the same name. The author writes:

"Union ADR provides employers with flexibility to manage the overall cost for their workers' compensation program by promoting voluntary agreement early on with the injured worker on effective medical treatment to reduce litigation over the scope of medical treatment."

That language is repeated, often verbatim, across the industry.

The California State Compensation Insurance Fund, the state-chartered insurance carrier and one of the largest administrators of ADR programs anywhere in the country, describes the program on its own website:

"The ADR process replaces litigation with services of an ombudsman and if needed, mediation and arbitration procedures designed to resolve claims quickly and appropriately."

The City of Los Angeles publishes the official goals of its civilian ADR program. Among them, in the program's own bullet points:

"The goals of the ADR Programs are to avoid the unnecessary misunderstandings and disputes, improve the speed and quality of medical care, improve claim resolution time, reduce workers' compensation claims costs, reduce litigation, and increase injured employees satisfaction."

"Reduce litigation" is on the official goal list.

A 2018 article in Insurance Thought Leadership, a defense-side trade publication, explains the appeal of ADR to insurance carriers in plainer terms:

"Predetermined and stipulated medical provider networks keep lien litigation to a minimum, and cases can be resolved and closed in a fraction of the time. With an emphasis on cooperation rather than pursuing a win-lose model, these provisions save insurance companies the costs of extended litigation and provide injured workers with prompt medical care and dispute resolution. It presents both parties with a win-win."

A 2020 announcement from Samuel Hale, a professional employer organization that uses an ADR carve-out, was even more direct in its marketing. The company's founder said:

"ADR accelerates the claims process and supports an employer's ability to manage the overall costs of their workers' compensation program. This process advocates for the employee while expediting medical treatment and mitigating litigation liability."

"Mitigating litigation liability", for the employer.

A defense-side California law firm, in an article titled "Demystifying Workers' Compensation ADR Programs," summarizes the state-commissioned research:

"A study was commissioned by the Commission on Health and Safety and Workers' Compensation, which suggested that carve-out programs 'resulted in substantial savings on both medical and indemnity costs, precipitous drops in litigation, and possible marked improvements in safety.'"

"Precipitous drops in litigation."

These are not characterizations by critics of ADR. These are direct quotes from the programs that run it, the carriers that profit from it, the brokers that place the policies, and the defense firms that defend the carriers. The reduction of litigation is not a side effect of ADR. It is the marketing pitch. It is the headline of the proponents' own article titles. It is the official goal of the public-sector programs. It is the sales pitch to insurance carriers.

You will not see this language in the worker-facing materials. The orientation video for your project does not say "this program is designed to reduce litigation against the property owner." It says "this program delivers faster, friendlier benefits." Both statements describe the same system. One of them tells you what the system is actually for.

The Hard Data

Marketing claims and academic findings are two different things. Here are the findings.

The California Division of Workers' Compensation publishes an annual report on ADR/carve-out program activity. The June 2012 report on 2004-2011 data found that in 2011, construction ADR programs resolved 774 claims before arbitration out of 778 total, 99.4 percent.

What that number means: in the formal adversarial proceeding where a worker would have a real chance to litigate a contested issue, almost no construction ADR claim ever gets there. The disputes are resolved earlier through ombudsman conversations and informal mediation, which are precisely the stages where the worker is most likely to be unrepresented, most likely to be relying on the program's own "neutral" personnel for guidance, and most likely to accept a resolution that favors the program.

The independent academic study by David Levine and his co-authors at UC Berkeley, the most rigorous research ever done on construction carve-outs, commissioned by the California Commission on Health and Safety and Workers' Compensation, found something more direct:

"The portion of seriously injured workers in carve-outs represented by attorneys was only half that of the statutory system."

Half.

Read it again. In carve-outs, seriously injured workers, the cases where the recovery is largest, the medical stakes are highest, and the legal issues are most complex, are represented by attorneys at half the rate of seriously injured workers in the regular workers' compensation system.

That number is the system working as designed. The "you do not need a lawyer" framing, the ombudsman as the friendly first point of contact, the medical record built by the on-site clinic, the closed provider network, every piece of the program reduces the probability that a seriously injured worker will end up in front of a lawyer. The data confirms that the program achieves exactly that result.

Why This Matters: The Lawsuit You Do Not Know About

Here is the part the proponent materials do not say.

When they talk about "reducing litigation," they describe the dispute resolution that happens inside the workers' compensation system, comp claims that would otherwise go to a hearing, get appealed, generate motion practice. That is the comp system litigation. Reducing it is the marketing pitch.

But the comp system, ADR or traditional, is the small pot. The wage benefit is two-thirds of average weekly wages, capped at $1,222.42 per week (2025-26 rate). No pain and suffering. No full lost earnings. No real compensation for a career-ending injury beyond the schedule formulas. ADR cannot meaningfully change the size of the comp pot.

The big pot, in any serious New York construction injury, is the third-party lawsuit.

Under Labor Law § 240, the Scaffold Law, the property owner and the general contractor face absolute liability for gravity-related injuries when proper safety equipment was not provided. The worker's own conduct does not reduce the recovery. Under Labor Law § 241(6), the same defendants are liable for violations of specific Industrial Code provisions covering scaffolding, ladders, falling objects, electrical hazards, and other construction safety rules.

The third-party case recovers what comp does not: pain and suffering, full lost wages, future earning capacity, loss of enjoyment of life. Severe injuries on union construction sites routinely produce six- and seven-figure recoveries.

Your ADR program does not handle this lawsuit. The third-party case lives entirely outside the comp system. ADR does not eliminate your right to file it. But every structural piece of the program, the representative, the controlled medical record, the "you do not need a lawyer" framing, the closed provider network, is designed to make sure you do not.

When the data shows that seriously injured workers in carve-outs have half the attorney representation rate of seriously injured workers in the regular system, what is being measured is precisely this: workers who never connected with a lawyer who would have filed the § 240 lawsuit. The litigation the program suppresses is not just the comp claim dispute. It is the third-party Labor Law lawsuit that would have been worth more than the comp claim ever could be.

This is the part where the proponents' own framing reveals what the program is actually built for. They say it reduces litigation. They say it saves insurance companies the costs of extended litigation. They say it mitigates litigation liability for employers. None of those statements is about the worker's comp benefit. All of them are about the lawsuit the worker would otherwise file.

And every academic study that finds "no evidence of harm" from ADR is measuring outcomes inside the comp system, claim resolution times, comp benefit levels, dispute rates.

The harm ADR causes lives outside the comp system, in the third-party lawsuits that were never filed. The studies cannot see what was never filed. The harm is structurally invisible to the research, by design.

The Worker Who Retains Counsel

A construction worker who is hurt on a New York project, retains an attorney within the first week, and pursues a Labor Law § 240 claim gets a coordinated case strategy that the ADR program will never provide.

The lawyer's investigator goes to the site, photographs the scene, identifies the safety equipment that failed, documents the conditions before the project moves on. Evidence preservation letters go to the property owner, the general contractor, and the subcontractors instructing them to preserve the scaffold, the ladder, the harness, the equipment, the project safety logs, the daily reports, the toolbox talk records, the OSHA documentation. Witnesses are identified and contacted before they scatter to the next job. The worker can see a treating physicians outside the program network, physicians whose independent clinical findings build the medical narrative the § 240 case will depend on.

The comp claim and the third-party lawsuit run together inside one firm, coordinated end to end. The comp lien at settlement is negotiated. The future credit against ongoing comp benefits is calculated into the recovery. The worker ends up with the comp benefits AND the third-party recovery, properly netted.

The worker who processes his injury entirely through the ADR program gets the on-site medic, the ombudsman, the comp benefits, and a returned-to-work date. The case that would have produced the larger recovery is not just lost. It is invisible to him. He has no way to know what was on the table.

The proponents of ADR will tell you that the comp benefits under their system are equal to or better than what you would get in the regular system. They are sometimes telling the truth about that. But the comp benefits were never the whole game. The game is the third-party Labor Law lawsuit, and the program is built to make sure you do not play it.

What to Do

If you are reading this after being hurt on a New York construction project covered by an ADR program, here is what to do today.

Talk to a New York Labor Law attorney before more time passes. Not the ombudsman. Not the program-recommended counsel. Not the friendly intake person at the on-site clinic. A Labor Law attorney whose practice represents injured construction workers in § 240 and § 241(6) cases.

Most serious New York construction injuries, falls, falling-object cases, electrocutions, struck-by injuries, have a third-party predicate. The statute of limitations under CPLR § 214 is three years, but the evidence supporting the case starts vanishing within days. The medical record built by an independent treating physician matters more than the on-site clinic note. The scene photographs and the witness contact information are easier to get this week than next month.

The program's own materials tell you what the program is built to do. The data tells you the program achieves what it sets out to achieve. The only thing the program cannot do, the one thing it has no power over, is whether you call a lawyer before the door closes on the lawsuit that was always yours to file.