Personal Injury Lawyers in Syracuse, NY

A personal injury claim is how you recover money for harm someone else caused, whether that was a driver who was not paying attention, a property owner who ignored a hazard, or a doctor who missed something they should have caught. If you are hurt and out of work, the bills do not wait, and that is usually what brings people to us first.

We are based in Syracuse, and our injury work covers Onondaga County along with Oneida, Oswego, Cayuga, Madison and Cortland. A case filed here goes to Onondaga County Supreme Court on Montgomery Street, a courthouse our attorneys are in regularly.

You pay us nothing up front. We handle injury cases on contingency, so our fee comes out of what we recover for you, and if we recover nothing you owe no attorney’s fee. If we do not think we can help you, we will say so and we will not take your money.

New York gives you three years from the date of most injuries to start a case, and several common situations give you less. A wrongful death claim runs two years from the date of death. A medical malpractice claim generally runs two years and six months. If the party at fault is a city, a county, a school district or a public authority, you may have as little as 90 days to file a formal notice of claim, and that is the step people miss most often.

These deadlines are firm. Missing one usually ends a claim regardless of how strong it was. If you are not sure which one applies to you, call and we will tell you where you stand.

New York is a no-fault state, so after a crash your own insurance covers your medical bills and part of your lost wages up to your policy limit, whoever caused it. Recovering anything beyond that, for the pain and the permanent damage, means showing what New York calls a serious injury. A broken bone, significant scarring, a permanent limitation, or 90 days of disability in the first six months can each qualify.

Insurers fight this point constantly, and it is the most common reason a Syracuse car accident claim ends up undervalued. Getting the medical record right in the first weeks is what protects it.

New York lets you recover even when you share some of the blame. Your award is reduced by your share and nothing further, so someone found 30 percent responsible for a crash can still recover 70 percent of their damages. An insurance adjuster will tell you the accident was your fault. That is a negotiating position, and the law decides what you are owed.

Onondaga County traffic runs through I-81, I-690 and the 481 interchange, and the crashes we see most often come out of those merges and the surface roads feeding them. We handle the insurance claim, the serious injury question and the lost wages together, because they move as one case. Start by reporting the crash to your own insurer and getting checked out even if you feel fine, since gaps in treatment are the first thing an adjuster points at.

Motorcycle riders sit outside New York’s no-fault system for the most part, which changes how a claim is built from day one. Injuries tend to be more severe and the other driver’s insurer tends to argue the rider was speeding or lane splitting. We collect the scene evidence early, while it still exists.

These cases turn on whether a provider departed from accepted care and whether that departure caused real harm. Surgical errors, missed diagnoses, medication mistakes and hospital negligence are the claims we field most from Syracuse-area hospitals and practices. The filing window is shorter than a standard injury case, so an early conversation matters more here than almost anywhere else.

New York gives construction workers protections that go well beyond most states, including rules that hold owners and general contractors responsible for falls from height and for unsafe scaffolding, regardless of whether the worker did anything wrong. A workers’ compensation claim does not close the door on a case against a third party. See our construction accident practice for how these claims are built.

A property owner has to keep the space reasonably safe, and a claim usually comes down to what they knew and when. Winter is the Syracuse version of this: ice that went untreated for hours, a walkway nobody salted, a stairwell light that had been out for weeks. Photographs taken the same day do more for these cases than anything else.

If you were hurt on the job, workers’ compensation covers your medical care and part of your lost wages without anyone having to prove fault. It also limits what you can recover from your employer directly. Where a case grows is a third party: a subcontractor, a property owner, a vehicle driver, or a defective piece of equipment. We look at both halves before deciding what your claim is worth.

A wrongful death claim belongs to the estate, and the people it compensates are the family members who depended on the person who died. It covers lost support, lost services and funeral costs, and the deadline is two years from the date of death. We keep this process as far off your shoulders as we can.

When a defective or unreasonably dangerous product causes an injury, the manufacturer, the distributor and sometimes the retailer can each be responsible. Keep the product, the packaging and the receipt if you still have them, because the item itself is usually the case.

New York treats these differently than most injuries. The owner is responsible for your medical costs, and recovering beyond that generally requires showing the owner knew the dog had bitten or threatened someone before. Reporting the bite to the county health department creates the record that later supports the claim.

Bedsores, repeated falls, sudden weight loss, dehydration and unexplained injuries are the signs families bring to us. Nursing home residents in New York have rights written into state law, and a facility that violates them can be liable on that basis alone. Keep a dated log of what you observe and photograph anything visible.

Here are the questions people ask us most often after an injury in Syracuse and across Central New York.

This page provides general information about New York injury law and is not legal advice about your situation. Every case is different. Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.