NY Lobby Day planned for April 20th, 2010

Many plaintiff’s attorneys are going to Albany, New York the State Capitol to address the legislature concerning the New York serious injury motor vehicle law also known as Insurance Law 5102(d) or the “threshold” law.  The New York State Trial Lawyers Association (NYSLTA) is attempting to change this law to avoid dismissal of cases with serious injuries.

The New York personal injury attorneys at Frekhtman & Associates will send a number of attorneys to participate in this effort.  We will also speak to clients whose cases were unfairly dismissed due to the threshold law.  Currently, Insurance Law 5102(d) has nine categories of serious injury. However, many of the categories are ill defined and open to numerous interpretations allowing some judges to dismiss claims while other judges uphold similar if not identical claims.  Furthermore, even if a client has sustained a serious injury, including knee surgery for example, a court may dismiss the case as not qualifying under Insurance Law 5102(d) on technical grounds such as that the medical doctor who treated the client after the accident failed to compare the range of motion of his knee to normal, or that the client had an unexplained gap in his medical treatment, and or that the client’s doctor did not compare his range of motion to normal at a time recent to defendant’s motion to dismiss. Any one of these failures by doctors to document an injury may lead to dismissal of otherwise meritorious and serious injury claims.

Hopefully, Lobby Day will prove fruitful in changing and old and outdated law that simply does not apply to contemporary litigation.