Slip & Fall Lawyer in New York

New York's statute of limitations for personal injury claims, including premises liability, is three years under CPLR § 214(5) — longer than California, Pennsylvania, or Texas. But that three-year rule is a trap if your fall happened on city, state, MTA, NYCHA, school district, or any other government property. Under NY General Municipal Law § 50-e, you must file a formal notice of claim within 90 days of the injury, and under § 50-i the lawsuit itself must be filed within one year and 90 days. Missing the 90-day notice forecloses the case entirely, even though two and a half years remain on the main SOL. NYC courts strictly enforce this deadline.

New York abolished the traditional invitee / licensee / trespasser classifications in Basso v. Miller, 40 N.Y.2d 233 (1976). Landowners owe a unified duty of reasonable care to all entrants based on the foreseeability of harm. This is a structurally plaintiff-friendly rule: a visitor's legal status on the property no longer dictates the duty owed. The core liability question is whether the owner had actual or constructive notice of the dangerous condition under Gordon v. American Museum of Natural History, 67 N.Y.2d 836 (1986), and whether a reasonable owner would have fixed it.

New York treats open-and-obvious hazards very differently from Pennsylvania or Texas. An obvious hazard does not automatically bar recovery — it goes to the rider's share of comparative fault under CPLR § 1411, not to whether the landowner owed a duty in the first place. Because New York is a pure comparative fault state, a plaintiff can be 70% responsible for not watching where they were walking and still recover 30% of their damages from a landowner who failed to maintain the property. That is a materially better outcome than the same case would produce in Pennsylvania.

New York City sidewalk liability is shifted onto abutting property owners under NYC Administrative Code § 7-210 (2003), with an exception for one-, two-, and three-family owner-occupied residential homes. This matters because most Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and Bronx sidewalk trip-and-fall cases target the commercial building owner, not the City. Winter snow-and-ice cases in New York face the "storm-in-progress" doctrine from Solazzo v. New York City Transit Authority, 6 N.Y.3d 734 (2005) — landowners generally have no duty to clear snow and ice until a reasonable time after the storm has ended, which creates a factual dispute about timing that is often resolved by weather records and surveillance video.