This central New York personal injury lawyer was born and raised in Syracuse, New York. My law offices are in Auburn, Cayuga County. I reside in Geneva, Ontario County. I am therefore fully rooted in central New York and the Finger Lakes region. But I like to travel. In fact, as a young man, I spent seven years living abroad. I speak several languages, including French and Spanish. My travels have taught me many things. One lesson I learned is that United States’ personal injury law is the best in the world. Let me explain by telling a story.
One evening, while visiting my in-laws in Guatemala City, Guatemala, I was walking down a dimly lit side street to get to my in-laws’ house. I came inches from stepping into a barely visible 3-foot wide, and who-knows-how deep, hole in the middle of the street. Municipal workers had created the hole and left it uncovered and un-barricaded. If I had taken one more step, I would have fallen into this hole and been seriously injured.
Why did the municipal employees leave the hole they were working on uncovered with no warnings or barricades? Because it did not matter to them. In Guatemala, a citizen can’t sue the City for personal injury, pain and suffering, lost wages and medical expenses for municipal workers’ negligence like we can in the United States. Since there was no price to pay, what incentive did those workers have to be careful? Answer: none.
Our civil justice system, and the personal injury lawyers who champion it, are responsible for the comparatively safe living standards that we enjoy in the United States, including: corporations providing consumers with safer products, doctors and hospitals employing safer medical practices on their patients, employers creating safer working conditions for their employees, landlords providing their tenants with safer apartments, owners of commercial business eliminating unnecessary hazards on their premises, and a host of other safety benefits that we Americans simply take for granted. Without our personal injury lawyers, and our generous civil justice system, none of these actors – manufacturers, doctors, employers, landlords, commercial property owners — would have the strong incentives they now have to make safety a top priority.
Travel the world and you will see what I mean. Without our tort system, our lives would be very different. We would have to contend with much more of what many people in the world find “normal”: unguarded holes in urban sidewalks and streets; chemical plants releasing harmful chemicals in neighborhoods; torturous mountain roadways with no guardrails; incompetent medical professionals performing unsafe procedures; toxic waste dumps near heavily populated areas; tainted and unsafe food supplies; dangerous drinking water; police brutality with impunity. The list goes on and on. All these evils are prevented here, in large part, by a civil justice system that allows victims of careless, negligent or intentional wrongdoers to be compensated fully for the harm caused.
Personal injury trial lawyers make society safer for everyone. That’s why I am proud to be one.