Lower Manhattan in New York City at sunrise

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Imagine this:  You and your family have fought long and hard, along with your personal injury lawyer, to win your accident lawsuit and have finally reached a settlement.  Your lawyer then comes to you and tells you that he or she has discovered that there is a “lien” against your recovery, and that you will have to pay a portion of your settlement funds to satisfy this “lien”, resulting in a reduction in the money that you will receive in your pocket from the settlement.  Frustrated and confused, you ask your personal injury attorney: “What is a lien and why do I have to pay it?”  A good personal injury attorney would give you the following explanation.

A “lien” refers to a legal right of another person to be repaid.  Typically, a “lien” will “attach” to an asset, such as a piece of property (e.g., a home or a car), and will require that funds generated by the sale of that property be used to repay the lien.  Liens can also attach to recoveries in personal injury lawsuits; and because winning a personal injury case is never guaranteed, these types of liens are known as “contingent liens”, which means that the lien only has to be repaid if the personal injury lawsuit is either settled or won at trial or arbitration.  Conversely, if a personal injury lawsuit is lost, many types of liens often do not have to be repaid.

There are many types of liens that can arise in the context of a personal injury lawsuit.  Some of the most common liens that personal injury victims encounter pertain to medical bills.  Sometimes, a medical provider will provide an accident victim with medical care and treatment, and will submit medical bills to a no-fault insurance provider, health insurance provider or workers’ compensation insurer for repayment.  However, sometimes, these medical coverage providers sometimes deny payment to the medical provider even though they have provided an accident victim with necessary medical care; and, in such a case, the medical provider may, rather than sending the accident victim a bill, assert a lien over the proceeds of your accident lawsuit to ensure full repayment for the medical treatment that they have provided.

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In New York personal injury and medical malpractice litigation, injured victims are entitled to ask a jury to award various items of damages (i.e., compensation), including, but not limited to, pain and suffering, lost wages and employment benefits, and medical expenses.  A jury may award compensation for “past” and “future” losses; the “past” losses are calculated from the date of the injury through the date of the jury’s verdict, and “future” losses are calculated from the date of the jury’s verdict through a date in the future selected by the jury based upon the evidence presented at trial as to how long the injured plaintiff (a “plaintiff” is the person who has been injured and who brings the lawsuit) is likely to continue experiencing the loss.  With respect to lost wages, lost employment benefits and medical expenses, however, “collateral sources” such as health insurance and disability insurance are often available to an injured plaintiff to pay for things like medical expenses or to replace lost wages incurred as a result of a disability from working.  In many cases, the injured plaintiff would be entitled to receive these benefits in the event of a serious disability whether or not he or she ever brought a lawsuit.

In New York personal injury lawsuits in which an injured plaintiff is awarded compensation for medical expenses or lost earnings (e.g., wages and social security benefits) or lost employee benefits (e.g., entitlement to medical insurance, pension benefits), the “collateral source rule”, codified in N.Y. C.P.L.R. Section 4545, may reduce the amount of compensation that can actually be collected from a judgment where a defendant can prove that the plaintiff’s losses are almost certain to be replaced by “collateral source” payments, and that the plaintiff will not experience any true “out of pocket” loss.  Though, in practice, the application of this rule is very complex (often involving additional hearings after the conclusion of the trial), the purpose of this article is to give injured accident victims a very basic, lay-person-level understanding of how this important rule may apply to their New York personal injury or medical malpractice case.

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Imagine the following scenario, which is quite common in Bronx personal injury lawsuits: After years of litigation, your personal injury case finally comes up for trial; and after a month-long trial, the jury awards you a substantial amount of money as compensation for your injuries. However, several months have passed, and your personal injury attorney explains that the defendants are still refusing to pay.

Why, you might ask are the defendants refusing to pay when a jury has decided that you are owed compensation? Shouldn’t a jury verdict, rendered after years of litigation and a long trial, be the end of the story? Unfortunately, the answer to these questions can often be “no”. This is because, even where a jury has found in your favor, defendants and insurance companies in New York personal injury lawsuits have the absolute right to appeal to the trial judge, as well as to the appellate courts (which may include, in the New York State Court system, the Appellate Division and the Court of Appeals), and ask that the jury’s verdict be modified or thrown out entirely. This article discusses some of the ways in which, even after a favorable jury verdict, defendants may still try to deny you the compensation that is rightfully yours.

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In the vast majority of personal injury lawsuits, the threat of a jury trial is a powerful tool against defendants and their insurance companies. The prospect of being forced to try to explain away seriously negligent conduct to a group of concerned citizens (the jury), especially in cases where that negligent conduct has caused catastrophic injuries to an innocent accident victim, is often too great a risk for a defendant and his or her insurance company to take and forces favorable settlements. This is because juries can award virtually unlimited sums of money to an injured plaintiff; and, especially in cases involving life-altering injuries, a jury’s sympathy for an injured accident victim may, in practicality, prove to be more important to the jury than the evidence or the law in rendering its verdict.

However, there are some personal injury cases in which, for a variety of reasons, a skilled accident lawyer may believe that a jury will not view the case favorably. These reasons can include the relative severity of the injuries (i.e., the injuries are not very severe, or the injuries did not cause the accident victim to miss any time from work or incur any significant medical bills), the fact that the injured victim had pre-existing medical conditions or prior injuries that can easily be conflated with the injuries caused by the accident underlying the lawsuit, or that the case is venued (i.e., the case was brought in a particular court, such as Westchester County) in a county in which juries are known to be unfriendly to particular types of personal injury cases. In such cases, your accident lawyer may decide that foregoing a jury trial and placing the case before an expert neutral “Arbitrator” (a lawyer or retired judge) for a final and binding decision is the best way to maximize the available compensation in the case.

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When parents send their children to school, they generally assume that they will be properly monitored, kept safe and protected from harm.  Inevitably, however, New York City’s school children do, on occasion, suffer injuries – sometimes very serious injuries – while at school.  Of course, a parent’s first instinct and priority is to make sure that their injured child receives immediate medical attention to treat their injuries.  After the immediate emergency of the injury has been dealt with, however, parents want to know how and why their child was permitted to be seriously injured while they were supposed to be under the care and supervision of school officials and teachers.  If a parent suspects that negligence of the school’s faculty, staff and/or administration is to blame for their child’s injuries, and the child’s injuries are potentially permanent, exploring the possibility of bringing a personal injury lawsuit against the school may be advisable.  In this article, we discuss how a parent might go about bringing such a personal injury lawsuit if their child was injured at a public school within the City of New York.  It should be noted that many of the procedures and rules discussed in this article may not apply if the child was injured at a private school, or due to the negligence of anyone apart from public school officials, staff or teachers.

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Whatever you think about President Trump, it is undeniable that he has kept his campaign promise to stringently – and, in many cases, cruelly – enforce the immigration laws of the United States of America.  Though he has not successfully put forth any significant immigration legislation in Congress, he has stepped up – to a seemingly-exponential degree – enforcement of existing laws and rules, and has also signed several Executive Orders directing immigration officials and agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (known as “ICE”) to increase efforts to find and deport hard-working, law-abiding, though undocumented immigrants.  In following the President’s orders, ICE has undertaken extremely-unsavory – nay, un-American – tactics in an effort to catch, process and deport undocumented immigrants in New York and all over the United States.

Among these distasteful methods of furthering President Trump’s agenda to deport more undocumented immigrants involves conducting raids and searches at courthouses across New York State, catching undocumented immigrants as they attempt to comply with our laws, respond to legal process, or seek justice to which they are entitled.  This tactic deprives the undocumented from vindicating their legal rights – yes, the undocumented do have a substantial number of legal rights and do have access to our courts – and puts the undocumented at risk of suffering inhuman and un-American abuses without the possibility of the legal recourse to which they are entitled.

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Among the hallmarks of President Barack Obama’s signature piece of healthcare legislation – known officially as The Affordable Care Act, but most-commonly referred to as “Obamacare” – was its expansion of Medicaid benefits to more Americans.  By way of background, Medicaid is a program run by the several States which is designed to provide medical coverage to vulnerable individuals among the population, and has a means test (i.e., an income-based test, as well as an asset-based test) to determine eligibility for benefits.  Prior to the passage of the Obamacare law, generally, only the neediest Americans had access to Medicaid.  This left many hard-working Americans who simply could not afford the high cost of health insurance and whose employers did not offer health insurance benefits in connection with employment without health insurance coverage.  For these Americans, a single serious illness or injury in the family could – and often did – lead to abject financial ruin, as, without health coverage, the medical bills associated with a serious illness or injury were simply too large to pay.  This was, unfortunately, the case of many victims of serious personal injury accidents or medical malpractice, who, despite having been injured by no fault of their own, were left to contend with mountains of medical bills that they simply could not afford to pay.  Even for those victims who were ultimately awarded compensation through a personal injury lawsuit or a medical malpractice lawsuit, during the years in which their case was pending, these bills often went unpaid as the victim and their family simply did not have the money.  Furthermore, these unfortunate victims often were denied the medical care necessary to treat their injuries, as, without healthcare coverage, many physicians and hospitals would refuse to treat them because payment for medical services simply could not be made.

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According to just about every television show or Hollywood movie ever made about a legal case of any kind (including personal injury cases), once a jury returns a verdict in favor of one party or another, the case is over.  Many a famed courtroom drama has ended just after the jury delivers its verdict, with the final scene often depicting a cathartic and celebratory scene on the courthouse steps between the victorious lawyer and his or her clients.  However, in this regard (as in many others), cinematic depictions of legal cases of all sorts are, to phrase it generously, inaccurate.  In a real personal injury or medical malpractice lawsuit, a jury verdict in favor of an injured plaintiff is very often not the end of the case.  This is because, under the court systems of every state across the United States, including the Federal Courts of the United States, the losing party at trial has the right to “appeal” various aspects of a jury verdict against them to a higher court and request that the jury verdict be overturned.  The post-verdict appeal process is extremely complicated, and to address all of the salient aspects of this process would require authorship of a textbook, rather than a blog post.  In this article, we explore some very basic concepts pertaining to the post-verdict appeals process as applied to personal injury and medical malpractice cases in the state court system in New York.  The reader is encouraged to take the following lesson from this article:  The jury verdict is not the end of the story, as the appeals process is expensive and fraught with risk; thus, if possible, it is usually advisable to attempt to obtain a final settlement of a New York personal injury or medical malpractice lawsuit (settlements cannot be appealed in almost every circumstance), rather than proceed through a jury verdict and an appeal.

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Ultimately, the goal of most every personal injury and medical malpractice case is to obtain compensation for a person who has been injured.  New York law recognizes several categories of damages in these cases, which include, but are not limited to, pain and suffering, lost earnings and earnings capacity, and medical expenses.  In personal injury and medical malpractice cases involving very serious injuries – those which leave an injured victim with a lifetime need for ongoing medical care and treatment – the cost of future medical care is often the largest item of damages for which the injured person can receive compensation.

An important tool used by skilled personal injury or medical malpractice attorneys to prove future medical expenses is known as the “life care plan”.  In brief, a life care plan is an analysis of the future medical needs of an injured person which describes appropriate and necessary future treatment and its costs.  In fact, while the main focus of the life care plan is future medical costs, they also help to substantiate an injured victim’s claims of future pain and suffering.  In this article, we explain the details of what a life care plan is, and its value to personal injury and medical malpractice lawyers representing very seriously injured people who require long-term medical care and treatment due to having suffered very serious injuries at the hands of negligent actors.

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The relationship between physician and patient is a partnership when it is functioning properly.  This is a partnership in which trust is a foundational and indispensable component.  When a patient seeks medical care and treatment from a doctor, the patient is entitled to trust that the doctor is providing full disclosure, informing the patient of all of the pertinent risks and benefits to a particular course of treatment, as well as alternative courses of treatment – which may include no treatment at all – for a particular medical condition.  This way, the patient can make an informed decision along with his or her doctor, and give informed consent to a course of medical treatment that may have both positive and negative effects upon the health of the patient. However, in all too many circumstances, a doctor or other medical provider does not provide the full disclosure to which the patient is entitled, and the patient agrees to undergo a course of medical care and treatment that the patient might not have opted for had full disclosure been provided.

When physicians breach the trust of their patient, fail to provide full disclosure to a patient, and harm the patient as a result, a species of medical malpractice claim known as “lack of informed consent” may accrue to the patient and entitle the patient to substantial compensation in a medical malpractice lawsuit.  These claims are often brought in tandem with medical malpractice claims involving a breach of the standard of care applicable to a particular course of medical treatment.  In this article, we explain the basic legal elements of a claim for “lack of informed consent” under New York medical malpractice law, and hope to educate readers about their legal rights if a doctor does not fully disclose all of the information regarding a particular course of medical treatment that he or she is obligated to discuss with a patient before undertaking to render care and treatment that may be harmful or undesirable.

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