Central New York Injury Lawyer Blog

I know I have blogged about this topic before, but after several years of blogging, you can’t help but repeat yourself sometimes.  Still, every time I discuss some aspect of New York personal injury law, I tackle it from a slightly different angle.  So here goes.

When will your New York personal injury lawyer try to settle your case?  Well, if he knows what he is doing, not until it is “ripe”.  When is it “ripe”?  It depends.  But the most important factor is whether your injuries are still receiving active treatment aimed at healing you.  If that is so, then you have not reached “maximum medical improvement”, also called “MMI”.  Your case is not “ripe”.

We personal injury lawyers don’t want to settle before you have reached MMI because as long as there is still some hope of your injury improving, the insurance adjuster will argue that you can still get better, and so she won’t pay the full value of your likely future pain and suffering, lost income, medical treatment, etc.  But if we wait until your doctor has documented MMI, then we can claim all the future pain and suffering and other damages, since reaching MMI means that any symptoms you still have are there for good.

I just read an article in the New York Times about a woman charged with stealing her 11-year-old daughter’s medical malpractice settlement to pay for liposuction, a “tummy tuck” procedure, online shopping, plane tickets, restaurant bills – you name it. She was using her child’s settlement money like her own private piggy bank!

The settlement was for medical malpractice that had left the child with severe, lifelong limitations in the use of her right arm.  The settlement was “structured” so that the victim would get payments every five years or so starting at age 18. She’ll need the money because of her severe income limitations! (We at Michaels Bersani Kalabanka have set up countless structured settlements like this one for injured children.)

But some $67,000 of the money was placed in a judicially protected savings account. Such a court-approved account is set up for the child to access – with accrued interest — when she turns 18. A parent can withdraw money from the account on behalf of the child before the child turns 18, but only for important educational or medical needs of a child, and only with a court order. To access the money on behalf of her child, a parent would normally seek the judge’s approval, and then present a signed court order to the bank to make whatever withdrawals the judge has approved. (We at Michaels Bersani Kalabanka have also set up countless court-protected bank accounts like this one for injured children).

Seal of the State of New York

Here is a letter I recently wrote to a client who suffered a serious injury caused by the negligence of the State of New York.  I’ll call my client “Joe”, though that’s not his real name:

Dear Joe: