Money In Your Pockets Tort Reform: What It Means for New Yorkers and An Injury Lawyer’s Thoughts

There is a now greater sense of urgency after an accident to reach out to a law firm, a personal injury law firm that has a lot of experience in car accidents that does this every day just like us. Tort reform came to New York State in the form of a new budget passed by Governor Hochul and in effect, you know, really hurting the rights of injured New Yorkers. Uber, they gave over $10 million to Governor Hochul, and unfortunately, she listened, and what she did was, along with Uber, behind her, they launched a campaign. In the past, it was actually signed, so now it’s in effect. The big campaign was “hey, let’s lower auto insurance for New Yorkers”, but to claim that personal injury lawsuits or fraud from personal injury cases are the only reason that insurance premiums are up is just flat-out false. There’s three high level things that really impact injured New Yorkers and notably injured New Yorkers in car accidents. Albany said if your injury stopped you from living your normal life for 90 out of 180 days after the crash, even if it wasn’t permanent, you had a right to pursue what you went through. But now Albany removed it. So, as of the second she signed it, no longer can you pursue a claim for 90/180, which means there are going to be tons and tons of people who rightfully deserve compensation who actually were injured um and they don’t meet the other the other parts of the serious injury threshold and they have zero recourse. The second implication is prior to her signing the bill, we were what’s called a pure contributory negligence state. She eliminated that. So now it’s new a modified comparative uh fault law which it’s a fancy way of saying if you are injured in an accident and you are found to be more than 50% at fault. No claim. Everything is barred. Everything. So you can’t recover non-economic damages, you can’t recover economic damages, nothing. It’s over. The third thing um that that’s going to affect people is if you are injured and it’s found that you just forgot to renew your auto insurance and it’s been more than 30 days. the most you can recover for non-economic damages, meaning past or future pain and suffering. And non-economic damages usually are the vast majority of damages or the amount of money in a settlement. The max you can recover is $100,000. People who are injured in car accidents, their rights were seriously limited. And you have to really think now uh about how this is going to affect you going forward. It’s it’s a shame, but unfortunately that’s what happened.