When you are injured due to someone’s negligence in an auto accident, truck accident, fall on defective stairs, or by a medical mistake or by toxic contamination released from a nearby manufacturing plant or by a defective drug or product, your remedy to recover damages is to make a claim within the civil justice system.

Introduction and background

The rules followed in this system are based upon a combination of statutory law (laws passed by the legislature) and what is referred to as common law, the law we inherited from the judicial precedents of English law, which have evolved through the judicial decisions of judges in the State of New York over the past few hundred years.

As compared to the criminal justice system, which is designed to punish and deter criminal conduct, the civil justice system is designed to compensate victims of negligence and to resolve other private disputes between citizens or corporations. Although there are rare cases in which a court can order that a defendant do something or stop doing something, referred to as injunctive relief, the vast majority of civil cases request payment of money damages for injuries suffered to person or property or to settle some other type of dispute, e.g. a breach of contract.

Commencing the law suit

In New York when an injured person retains a lawyer to start a law suit, the act that the lawyer performs to accomplish this is to file a summons and complaint in the appropriate county clerk’s office (usually in the county where the incident occurred, but occasionally in some other county where either the injured person or the person that caused the injury resides). This act of filing the summons and complaint stops the legal clock established by the applicable statute of limitations, which is window of time after the incident that the legislature has adopted for the filing of the case. This is a very important deadline because it cannot be extended by a court. The filing of this summons and complaint tolls (stops the clock on) this statute of limitations as long as the summons and complaint is served (personally or otherwise delivered) to the defendant within 120 days of the filing. Once this is accomplished and the case has started, the statute of limitations is satisfied and is no longer relevant. More…

Statutes of Limitations are legally binding rules that establish time periods within which a lawsuit or claim must be filed. They are generally bright lines that once passed will forever bar even a clearly meritorious lawsuit. That said, there are certainly valid policy reasons for the imposition of time periods for the initiation of legal proceedings. The statute of limitations embodies the principles that the value of evidence diminishes over time and that parties to a dispute need closure, so fairness dictates that the person bringing the lawsuit act with speed and efficiency to preserve these principles.

Of course, fairness is a two way street: the time periods are generally crafted to give the party bringing the lawsuit sufficient time to learn they have been harmed. Indeed, in many States, the time periods do not begin to run until a person knows or reasonably should know that they have been injured. It is in this regard that the New York statute of limitations in medical malpractice cases is so unfair. More…