Law firms in New York

New York runs one of the largest court systems in the world, and its naming conventions confuse almost everyone on first contact.

The trial court of general jurisdiction is called the Supreme Court. It is not supreme. It sits in every county, hears the major civil and criminal cases, and its decisions can be appealed. The state's highest court is the Court of Appeals in Albany, seven judges who take a small fraction of the cases offered to them (N.Y. Const. art. VI).

Between the two sit the Appellate Divisions of the Supreme Court, four departments that hear appeals by region. Their published decisions bind the trial courts within each department, which means the operative rule on a question can differ between Brooklyn and Buffalo until the Court of Appeals settles it.

Below the Supreme Court, jurisdiction splinters by geography and subject. County Courts handle felonies and mid-sized civil matters outside New York City. The New York City Civil Court takes claims up to $50,000; City Courts elsewhere have lower ceilings; town and village Justice Courts, nearly 1,200 of them, handle small claims, traffic, and local matters. Surrogate's Court deals with estates. Family Court covers custody, support, and neglect.

Two specialized venues matter to injured people and businesses. The Court of Claims is the only place to sue New York State itself, with its own filing rules and no jury. The Commercial Division of the Supreme Court, with seats in Manhattan and several other counties, takes complex business disputes above monetary thresholds and runs them under stricter case-management rules.

Practice here is electronic. The state's e-filing system, NYSCEF, carries most new civil filings in the Supreme Court, and the public can read most e-filed documents without charge, a level of transparency few states match.

Judges in the Supreme Court are elected by judicial district; Court of Appeals judges are appointed by the governor from a commission's list and confirmed by the Senate. The mix produces a bench with deep local roots at trial and a centrally selected court of last resort.

For a claimant, the practical takeaways are three. The court named on your papers depends on how much you seek and whom you sue. The government defendants have their own forum and their own clock. And the deadline rules, the subject of the next section, apply with full force no matter which door you enter.

A few structural details matter in practice. Civil juries in New York seat six jurors, and five of the six can return a verdict; unanimity is not required. The state divides into thirteen judicial districts for electing Supreme Court justices, and the four Appellate Division departments sit over them in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Albany, and Rochester.

Between the Appellate Division and the local courts, the Appellate Terms, panels of Supreme Court justices in the First and Second Departments, hear appeals from the New York City Civil and Criminal Courts and from District and Justice Courts on Long Island and in Westchester. It is another layer that exists in only part of the state, one more example of geography deciding procedure in this state.

Small claims parts offer the simplest entry point: evening sessions, relaxed evidence rules, and modest monetary ceilings that make counsel optional for minor disputes.

The Court of Appeals also answers certified questions from federal courts, most often from the Second Circuit, when a case turns on unsettled state law. Several of the doctrines described later in this guide, including the reach of the Scaffold Law and the serious injury threshold, arrived at their current shape through exactly that dialogue.

Administrative control is centralized under a Chief Administrative Judge, and the court system publishes caseload statistics that would embarrass smaller states: millions of filings a year across all courts, with the New York City courts carrying the heaviest volume. Scale is part of why procedure here is codified, electronic, and unforgiving of missed steps.

Injury-adjacent matters scatter across this map in ways newcomers rarely expect. A car crash claim belongs in Supreme or Civil Court, but the guardianship needed for an incapacitated victim runs through its own proceeding, an estate for a deceased one opens in Surrogate's Court, and any settlement for either returns to a judge for approval. One accident can touch three courts before the money moves.

The Office of Court Administration publishes annual caseload reports, and the through-line in them is volume: intake on a scale that forces standardization. Preliminary conference orders, disclosure schedules, and certification deadlines arrive on forms, and the lawyers who calendar them precisely extract real advantage from a system too busy to forgive drift.

Two practical notes complete the map. Filing fees differ by court and are waived for those who qualify for poor person relief, and interpreters are a right in every courtroom in the system, available on request in more than one hundred languages. Access problems here are usually problems of information, not of doors.

New York fixes its limitation periods in the Civil Practice Law and Rules, and the differences between them decide cases every week.

The general personal injury period is three years from the accident (N.Y. C.P.L.R. 214(5)). Property damage claims share the three-year rule. Contract actions get six years (C.P.L.R. 213(2)).

Medical malpractice is shorter: two years and six months from the malpractice or from the end of continuous treatment for the same condition (C.P.L.R. 214-a). Lavern's Law, added in 2018, starts the clock for missed cancer diagnoses at discovery, a narrow but important exception.

Wrongful death claims must be brought within two years of the death by the estate's representative (N.Y. Est. Powers & Trusts Law § 5-4.1). The two-year period runs separately from any personal injury claim the decedent could have brought.

Suing a municipality compresses everything. A notice of claim against a city, county, school district, or public authority must be served within 90 days of the incident (N.Y. Gen. Mun. Law § 50-e), and the lawsuit itself generally within one year and 90 days (§ 50-i). Courts can excuse a late notice, but permission is discretionary and never guaranteed. New York City's sidewalks, buses, and hospitals generate thousands of these short-fuse claims a year.

Tolling rules soften the edges for some claimants. Infancy and insanity toll many periods under C.P.L.R. 208, so a child injured at ten does not lose the claim at thirteen. The Child Victims Act (C.P.L.R. 214-g) went further, opening a revival window for decades-old abuse claims and extending the civil deadline for survivors, one of the most consequential limitation changes in the state's modern history.

Discovery-based accrual is the exception in New York, not the rule. Toxic exposure claims accrue at discovery of the injury under C.P.L.R. 214-c, but an ordinary negligence claim accrues at the moment of harm even if its full extent appears later.

Missing a period is almost always fatal to the claim. The courts apply these statutes strictly, and the sympathetic facts that might move a jury never reach one.

Deadlines are only half of what makes accident practice here distinctive. The other half is an insurance system that decides whether a crash victim may sue at all, and it is the subject of the next section.

Shorter periods trap the unwary. Defamation and most intentional torts, assault and battery among them, carry a one-year statute (C.P.L.R. 215), so the same bar fight can leave a live negligence theory and a dead battery claim within months.

Several safety valves exist, each narrow. C.P.L.R. 205(a) gives a plaintiff whose timely case was dismissed on certain non-merits grounds six months to refile. Written acknowledgments can restart contract periods under General Obligations Law § 17-101. The foreign object rule in C.P.L.R. 214-a lets a patient sue within one year of discovering a sponge or clamp left behind, no matter how old the surgery.

Cross-border claimants meet the borrowing statute, C.P.L.R. 202: a claim that accrued outside New York must be timely under both New York's period and the other jurisdiction's, whichever is shorter. Forum shopping into New York for its generous periods does not work for nonresidents.

Two more traps deserve their own lines. A notice of claim is not a lawsuit, and serving one does not stop the one-year-and-90-day period from running. And an estate must actually be appointed before it can sue, so the two-year wrongful death clock often hides a Surrogate's Court errand inside it.

Calendar discipline, in short, is substantive law in New York. The insurance system described next adds one more clock, and it is the shortest of all.

Contractual periods can undercut the statutes silently. Insurance policies routinely require suit within two years of a property loss, and uninsured motorist coverage sets its own demand and arbitration deadlines; both are enforceable even though no statute mentions them. The limitation analysis in any case here reads the contracts as closely as the CPLR.

Equitable estoppel survives as a last resort where a defendant's own misconduct concealed the claim, but courts apply it sparingly and demand proof of actual deception, not mere silence. No practitioner plans a case around it.

The savings provisions reward attention as much as the deadlines punish inattention. A case dismissed for a defect in papers can often be refiled within six months under 205(a); a claim thought lost sometimes is not. The reverse is also true, and the only safe habit is treating every period as jurisdictional until research says otherwise.

Practitioners keep a separate calendar for lien and subrogation deadlines as well, since workers' compensation carriers and health plans assert their rights on their own schedules. A statute survived is not a file closed until every clock in it has been answered.

When in doubt, lawyers here file protective actions before research is complete rather than after it is too late; a discontinued case costs a filing fee, while a missed statute costs the claim.

New York is a no-fault automobile state, and the label changes the first year of every crash claim.

Every auto policy issued in the state must carry personal injury protection of at least $50,000 per person, called basic economic loss (N.Y. Ins. Law § 5102). After a crash, the injured person's own insurer pays medical bills and a portion of lost earnings regardless of who caused the collision. The trade is speed for silence: bills get paid without a fault fight, and in exchange, most lawsuits over minor injuries are barred.

The bar sits in Insurance Law § 5104. A person injured in a crash here may sue for pain and suffering only if the injury is a serious injury as the statute defines it.

The definition in § 5102(d) is a list, not a standard. It includes death, dismemberment, significant disfigurement, a fracture, loss of a fetus, permanent loss of use of a body organ or member, permanent consequential limitation, significant limitation of use of a body function or system, and a 90/180-day category for injuries that prevent usual daily activities for 90 of the first 180 days.

Litigation over that list is an industry of its own. The Court of Appeals requires objective medical evidence, not just complaints of pain, to cross the threshold, and its decision in Toure v. Avis Rent A Car Systems, Inc., 98 N.Y.2d 345 (2002) remains the reference point for what qualifies. A fracture qualifies categorically; soft-tissue injuries live or die on imaging, measured range-of-motion deficits, and credible medical narrative.

Practical consequences follow. First, no-fault paperwork has its own deadline: the application for benefits must generally reach the insurer within 30 days of the accident, far ahead of any court statute. Second, treatment records do double duty, supporting both the benefits file and any later threshold argument. Third, a claim that fails the threshold is not worthless; economic losses above the no-fault package can still be pursued.

The system has boundaries. Motorcyclists are outside no-fault protection while riding, pedestrians and cyclists struck by cars are inside it, and crashes in the course of employment route first through workers' compensation.

Out-of-state readers should note the contrast: in a pure fault state, any crash victim may sue; in New York, the statute screens the courthouse door. It is the clearest example of a theme that runs through this guide and expands in the next section, the state's habit of writing rules that exist almost nowhere else.

The benefit package has fixed contours. Basic economic loss covers necessary medical treatment, 80 percent of lost earnings up to $2,000 a month for up to three years, and modest incidental expenses, all within the $50,000 ceiling (Ins. Law § 5102(a)). Policyholders can buy optional basic economic loss and additional PIP above the floor, and many do not learn the difference until after a crash.

Procedure is fast and rigid. The no-fault application, form NF-2, must generally reach the insurer within 30 days of the accident, medical bills within 45 days of treatment, and lost wage proof within 90 days, under the regulations in 11 N.Y.C.R.R. part 65. Late filings can be excused for good cause, but insurers deny first and argue later.

Denied benefits move to a parallel dispute system: no-fault arbitration administered through the American Arbitration Association, with its own case law and its own bar. Providers, who take assignments of benefits, are the most frequent arbitration claimants, which is why a crash victim can receive collection letters while an insurer and a clinic litigate a bill the victim never sees.

Exclusions define the edges. Motorcyclists are outside no-fault while riding, though pedestrians they strike are inside it. Intoxicated drivers can lose benefits after conviction-level proof. Out-of-state accidents involving New York policies, and New York accidents involving out-of-state vehicles, generate choice-of-law questions that the regulations only partly answer.

For claim strategy the threshold changes everything: defense firms move for summary judgment on serious injury as a matter of routine, and the motion practice around § 5102(d), supported or defeated by imaging, measured deficits, and treating physicians' affirmations, resolves more New York crash litigation than juries do. The records assembled in the no-fault file in month one decide those motions in year two.

Coordination rules decide who pays first. Workers' compensation benefits offset no-fault for on-the-job crashes, health insurers stand behind the no-fault carrier rather than ahead of it, and nothing in the basic package ever compensates pain itself; the benefits replace bills and wages, and only a lawsuit past the threshold reaches human loss.

The system is also self-financing in a way claimants notice: no-fault insurers who lose at arbitration pay the provider's attorney fees under the regulations, which keeps the dispute machinery running without cost to the injured person in most bill fights.

Claimants who keep every explanation of benefits and denial letter in one folder resolve these disputes months faster than those who reconstruct the file later.

Some New York statutes are simply unusual, and several of them decide real cases every day.

The most famous is Labor Law § 240(1), the Scaffold Law. It gives construction workers injured by falls from heights, or struck by falling objects, a claim against owners and general contractors with absolute liability: comparative fault is no defense once a violation is shown. The Court of Appeals confirmed the rule's reach in Runner v. New York Stock Exchange, Inc., 13 N.Y.3d 599 (2009), treating gravity-related risk as the statute's core. No other state keeps a rule like it, and it shapes the cost and insurance structure of every construction project in the state.

Its companion, Labor Law § 241(6), ties liability to violations of the Industrial Code, giving injured workers a second statutory route that most states also lack.

The state's comparative fault rule is pure (C.P.L.R. 1411). A claimant 99 percent responsible can still recover 1 percent of the damages. Combined with the absence of any general cap on compensatory damages in personal injury cases, including pain and suffering, New York gives juries a range most states have legislated away. There is no statutory ceiling to strike down because none was enacted.

The Dram Shop Act (N.Y. Gen. Oblig. Law § 11-101) lets a person injured by an intoxicated adult sue the establishment that unlawfully sold the alcohol. The claim belongs to the injured third party, not the drinker, and it survives alongside the claim against the drunk driver.

Judiciary Law § 487 is older and stranger: an attorney who engages in deceit or collusion in litigation is liable to the injured party for treble damages, under a statute with roots in colonial-era law. It is invoked rarely and feared consistently.

A cluster of consumer rules rounds out the picture. General Business Law § 349 gives a private claim for deceptive business practices with statutory minimum damages. Lien Law article 2 builds a trust over construction funds. And New York's long-standing rule against most non-compete enforcement for low-wage workers arrived by enforcement policy and case law rather than a single statute, another reminder that the state's law often moves first and alone.

Being harsh is sometimes the point. The 90-day municipal notice from the deadlines section, the strict threshold from the no-fault section, and the Scaffold Law's absolute liability all allocate risk deliberately, toward speed, toward insurers, or toward worker protection.

What these rules mean in practice, for a person deciding where, when, and with whom to bring a New York claim, is the subject of the final section.

The strangest rule of all may be the one that governs death. New York's wrongful death statute, enacted in 1847 and now codified in EPTL 5-4.3, limits recovery to pecuniary loss: lost income, lost services, lost inheritance. Grief itself is not compensable. Nearly every other state allows a family's emotional loss to be valued; New York and Alabama stand apart. The Grieving Families Act, which would have added grief damages and broadened who may recover, passed the Legislature repeatedly and was vetoed four consecutive times, most recently on December 5, 2025. The 178-year-old rule still stands, and it prices the death of a child or a retiree, people without earnings, at almost nothing beyond the funeral.

Labor Law § 200 codifies the general duty of care on job sites, and the trio of sections 200, 240, and 241 makes construction litigation here a self-contained field with its own treatises.

General Business Law § 349 reaches deceptive consumer practices with a private right of action, statutory damages of at least $50, and treble damages up to $1,000 for willful violations, plus attorney's fees. Its companion, § 350, covers false advertising. Both apply to consumer-oriented conduct generally, which has made them workhorses in litigation over subscriptions, fees, and misleading marketing.

Even the state's procedural generosity can be harsh in reverse. Because the state has no cap on compensatory damages, defendants face verdict exposure that settlement models elsewhere never price, and because CPLR article 16 modifies joint liability for non-economic damages only above 50 percent fault, the arithmetic of multi-defendant cases is its own specialty.

None of these rules is a museum piece. The Scaffold Law appears in thousands of filings a year, § 349 in consumer class actions, and the pecuniary-loss rule in every wrongful death settlement conference in the state. The final section turns them into a practical checklist.

The Scaffold Law's critics and defenders have argued for decades about its insurance costs, and repeal bills appear in every legislative session without ever advancing. Whatever the economics, the political record is one of the clearest signals in American tort law: the rule survives because the state wants it to.

Each of these statutes rewards early issue-spotting. A file reviewed in week one for scaffold coverage, dram shop exposure, and consumer claims is routinely worth more than the same file reviewed only as a car crash, because the unusual theories carry the unusual remedies.

New York procedure rewards early, organized action more than most states, because so many of its rules front-load the risk.

Identify every government actor in the first week. If a city vehicle, a public hospital, a school, or a state agency is involved, the 90-day notice of claim controls the calendar (Gen. Mun. Law § 50-e), and a claim against New York State itself belongs in the Court of Claims under its own rules. Private-defendant claims can wait months for investigation; municipal ones cannot.

After a crash, open the no-fault file immediately. The benefits application generally must reach the insurer within 30 days, treatment should be consistent, and every visit should be documented with the serious injury threshold in mind. The insurance sections of this guide explain why those records decide whether a lawsuit is possible at all.

Choose the forum deliberately. Claims up to $50,000 in the five boroughs fit the New York City Civil Court, faster and cheaper than the Supreme Court; larger claims belong upstairs. Venue follows the parties' residences or the accident county, and the difference between a Bronx jury and a rural one is part of every valuation conversation in the state.

Do not self-penalize for shared fault. Under pure comparative negligence (C.P.L.R. 1411), partial fault reduces a recovery; it does not erase one. Claimants who assume a jaywalking ticket or a missed mirror check ends the case give up claims the statute preserves.

Construction workers occupy a privileged position that many never learn about. A fall from a ladder or scaffold triggers Labor Law § 240(1) scrutiny, and the absolute liability described in the previous section applies over and above workers' compensation. Reporting the accident precisely, photographing the equipment, and preserving the site conditions are worth more in New York than almost anywhere else.

Expect litigation to run through NYSCEF, with most filings public. Expect depositions in even mid-sized cases. And expect settlement talk to intensify around the note of issue, the filing that marks a case trial-ready.

When choosing counsel, apply the verification habits this directory is built on. Confirm active New York bar standing, business registration, and real contact channels, each shown with a dated check on the firm's profile, whether the firm sits in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, or Albany. Verification is independent of membership tier here, and it should be independent of advertising everywhere.

The through-line of this guide is simple. New York courts are navigable, its deadlines are unforgiving, its insurance system screens the courthouse door, and its unusual statutes cut in identifiable directions. A claimant who respects the calendar, documents the medicine, and verifies the counsel starts the case the way New York law quietly demands.

Settlements for minors and incapacitated persons need court approval through an infant compromise order (C.P.L.R. 1207-1208), with the judge reviewing the fee, the liens, and the plan for the funds. Structured settlements are common in these approvals, and the discipline is protective rather than bureaucratic.

Insurance transparency helps claimants here more than in most states: defendants in personal injury actions must disclose the existence and limits of liability coverage in discovery (C.P.L.R. 3101(f)), so valuation conversations in New York happen against known numbers sooner than they do elsewhere.

Independent medical examinations are a defense tool with rules. The claimant may bring a representative, the examiner's report must be exchanged, and treating physicians' sworn statements carry real weight in threshold motions. Preparing honestly for an IME, and never exaggerating at one, protects the record that summary judgment will be decided on.

Social media deserves a standing warning. Courts here allow discovery of relevant private posts, and a single gym photograph has undone more than one 90/180-day claim. The safest rule during litigation is silence.

Fee structures follow Judiciary Law § 474 and court rules: standard contingency schedules in medical malpractice are set by statute on a sliding scale, while general personal injury retainers commonly run one third. Every retainer must be in writing and filed where the rules require it.

The checklist, then: identify public defendants within days, file the no-fault application within 30, calendar the statute that fits the claim, document the medicine with the threshold in mind, disclose nothing on social media, and verify counsel's credentials with dated evidence rather than advertising. New York practice is procedural chess, and the opening moves are forced.

Trial-readiness has a formal marker here: the note of issue and certificate of readiness, which close disclosure and start the clock toward a trial calendar. Defendants time summary judgment motions to it, since the CPLR gives them 120 days after filing, and settlement pressure concentrates in that window as surely as it does at jury selection.

Keep the originals of everything. Certified records move faster through motions than copies chased at deadline, and a complete file in the client's own hands is quiet insurance against every transition a long case can take.