Personal Injury Attorney in Albany, NY

What Is a Personal Injury Claim?

Very few accidents are random, with no one to blame. Those would not qualify as personal injury claims. In most accident cases, someone did something to cause it. A valid personal injury claim must prove that another person or party acted carelessly and that their behavior directly harmed you or a loved one. This behavior is legally called negligence.

Most personal injury claims involve negotiating with the at-fault party’s insurance company. You will be seeking compensation for the injuries and losses that you suffered as a result of the insured’s negligence. Legal problems typically arise when the insurance company disputes liability for the accident or the severity of your injuries.

They may also claim that you shared a portion of the fault. A personal injury law firm can take over all settlement negotiations and fight for fair compensation for your injuries. An attorney can also stand up for you so that you are not assigned an unfair proportion of the fault.

New York sets deadlines for how long you have to file different types of injury claims.

• Personal injury: 3 years from the date of the accident or injury
• Medical malpractice: 2 years and 6 months from the date of the malpractice or end of continuous treatment of a condition, illness, or injury
• Wrongful death: 2 years from the date of death

In certain cases against government agencies, you must provide notice of a potential claim within 90 days after the accident.
Talk to a lawyer at Powers & Santola, LLP, before the statute of limitations for your claim expires so that your claim isn’t barred in court.

One important note

New York handles car accident claims differently from other personal injury claims. New York is a no-fault state. That means that if you are in a crash, you will first ask your own insurance company to pay for your medical costs and other economic losses, even if you did not cause the accident.

Compensation from the other party’s insurance carrier may be available only if you sustained serious injuries such as disfigurement or substantial loss of a body function. Examples of this include herniated discs, vision loss, internal injuries, psychological damage, and permanent scarring. A Powers & Santola, LLP, lawyer can talk to you about other possible avenues for compensation if you’ve been in a car accident.

How Do I Know If I Have a Personal Injury Case?

When we provide a consultation about your case, we will answer all of your questions and learn more about what happened to you or your family member. In particular, we will focus on whether your case contains the four basic elements of a personal injury claim:

• Duty
  To be liable to you, a person, company, or government agency owes a duty of care to you. For instance, New York’s “Scaffold Law” places a duty on construction site owners, contractors, and their agents to ensure the safety of workers who operate in a location, or in a manner, where they could fall from one level to another.
• Breach
  You must show that a party failed to fulfill the duty of care owed to you. For example, a doctor may have breached a duty of care owed to you as a patient if the doctor failed to order proper tests based on your symptoms (causing your cancer to go undiagnosed).
• Causation
  You must also establish that a party’s negligence – whether actions or failure to act – caused harm to you. For example, if a driver had not been recklessly texting while driving, the driver would not have crossed the center line and struck your vehicle
• Damages
  Finally, you must show that you suffered actual harm as a result of the party’s conduct such as severe bodily injuries that required you to stay in a hospital for a prolonged period and to miss time at your job.

Contact An Experienced Personal Injury Lawyer

At Powers & Santola, LLP, a personal injury lawyer will provide a frank assessment of your case. We limit the number of personal injury claims we handle. Doing so allows us to work closely with each client and thoroughly prepare each case.

To learn more about the steps that are involved in pursuing a personal injury lawsuit in New York, please see our Timeline.

What Can a Personal Injury Lawyer Recover in Albany?

Our goal at Powers & Santola, LLP, is to make a fundamental difference in each client’s life. We know how difficult it can be to suffer from traumatic brain injury, spinal cord damage or severe burns due to the careless or reckless acts of another.

We also know that money cannot replace all that is lost when someone is catastrophically injured or killed in an accident. But we can analyze your case and advise you of your legal options. Should you move forward with your claim, we always push for the maximum amount of compensation possible.

New York law divides personal injury damages into categories. There are economic damages, which compensate victims for financial losses resulting from an accident. Economic damages are easily quantified with documents such as bills and receipts.

Victims may also be awarded non-economic damages. This is money for injuries that aren’t as easy to add up with a calculator, such as pain and suffering or humiliation. It can be challenging for a judge or jury to place a dollar amount on losses that can’t be backed by solid numbers. Powers & Santola, LLP, regularly employs experts to support claims for non-economic damages. Their testimony can be a key part of you getting the money you deserve. We work tirelessly to pursue the compensation that our clients deserve, including:

• Medical expenses
  Medical expenses – We can review your medical records and consult with experts to determine and pursue your past and future medical costs, including emergency care, operations, hospitalization, medication, assistive devices, and rehabilitation.
• Lost income
  Lost income – We will seek a recovery that reflects the wages you have lost to date and will lose in the future due to your diminished ability to earn a living as a result of your injuries.
• Pain and suffering
  Pain and suffering – We will strive to recover compensation for your physical pain, disfigurement, and emotional suffering, including the loss of your enjoyment of life.
• Loss of consortium
  Loss of consortium – We can also seek to hold the at-fault party responsible for the harm done to your relationship with your spouse
• Punitive damages
  Punitive damages – In addition to compensatory damages, a party who injured you by engaging in intentionally harmful or willfully or wantonly negligent or reckless actions can be held liable for punitive damages as well.

New York follows a doctrine of pure comparative fault. This means that your recovery in a personal injury claim can be reduced according to the percentage of fault assigned to you. If the other party in your case claims that you were at fault for your injuries, we will be ready to answer.

If you have lost a loved one due to the negligence of another, please see our Wrongful Death section to learn more about your rights and the damages that can be pursued in those cases.

Cases Our Personal Injury Lawyers Handle in Albany

The attorneys at Powers & Santola, LLP, focus primarily on three areas of law:

Medical Malpractice

Three of our attorneys have been recognized as The Best Lawyers in America in the area of Plaintiff’s Medical Malpractice. We can help clients who have suffered injuries due to surgical errors, medication mistakes, missed or delayed diagnoses, hospital-acquired infections, or those impacted by birth injuries.

Construction Site Accidents
Partner Daniel R. Santola is the author of Litigating Construction Accident Claims in New York and a leading authority on construction accident claims that are brought through New York’s Labor Laws.

Motor Vehicle Accidents
Partner Daniel R. Santola is the author of Litigating Construction Accident Claims in New York and a leading authority on construction accident claims that are brought through New York’s Labor Laws.

Due to our legal skill, experience and resources, we can handle personal injury cases in a wide range of other areas, including:

Nursing Home Abuse and Neglect
We assist families who have suffered due to the physical, sexual, or emotional abuse of an elderly loved one in a New York nursing home.

Premises Liability
We can represent those who have suffered serious injuries due to slip-and-fall accidents on private, commercial, or government property or who have been injured in other incidents due to hazardous property conditions.

Defective Products
Defective products – We stand up for the rights of consumers who have been harmed by defectively designed or manufactured products or by manufacturers’ failure to provide sufficient warnings about risks associated with their products.

Is a Personal Injury Attorney an Affordable Option?

Some people may worry about the cost of hiring an attorney. Let us put those fears to rest. You have nothing to lose by working with an attorney at our firm. We charge nothing upfront. Powers & Santola, LLP, handles all of its claims on a contingency basis. That means we only get paid if we recover a verdict or settlement on your behalf.

How does that work? Powers & Santola, LLP, will pay for all of the court costs and any other services needed to investigate your case in depth. If we win, we will accept payment as a percentage of your award, as well as reimbursement for any services that we paid in order to prevail on your claim. An alternative fee arrangement may be negotiated depending on the attorney or law firm. There are also special rules on fee arrangements in New York medical malpractice cases. However, they are still contingent fees, meaning there is no financial outlay from you at the start.

Why would we risk our own money with no promise of reward? It’s because Powers & Santola, LLP, only accepts cases that we believe have merit. We don’t represent whoever walks in our door.

When we take your case, you can be assured that our interests are aligned with yours. We want to help you secure the maximum amount of compensation on your claim. The more we recover for you, the more we get paid as well. No one else has your best interests in mind after an accident – this includes insurance companies, the police, and the courts.

The attorneys at Powers & Santola, LLP, strongly advise against representing yourself. Research shows that non-lawyers rarely prevail in court. It’s also possible to make mistakes at the beginning of the process that can be challenging for an attorney to fix later. Studies also show that claimants with attorneys actually end up with more money than those who try to negotiate a settlement on their own.

The beauty of a contingency fee arrangement is that there is nothing to lose. In fact, you never have to pay our attorney’s fees out of your pocket. If we win compensation for you, we deduct our fees from the total award and pass all the rest along to you. If we are unable to recover compensation for you, we don’t get paid. It’s as simple as that.

It all starts with a free consultation that comes with no strings attached.