Filing a birth injury lawsuit in New York could be a lengthy process, so it’s important to start the lawsuit as soon as possible. The statute of limitations for filing a birth injury case is two and a half years after the injury took place, or within two and a half years after the final treatment that resulted in the injury.
New York does not have a discovery rule to allow for a malpractice suit to be brought if the injury is not discovered until after the statute of limitations; however, if the injury resulted in a surgery, and the surgery involved the accidental or purposeful placement of an unauthorized foreign object in the child’s body, then the statute of limitations extends to one year after the discovery of the object.
New York places no caps on damages that can be awarded in a birth injury lawsuit. However, there are regulations in place that state how much an attorney can collect from a malpractice lawsuit. This is similar to the sliding scale for legal fees used in California. This regulation states that an attorney can charge 30% of the first 250,000 awarded. They can collect 25% of the next 250,000 awarded. The next 500,000 dollars after that, they can collect 20% of, and they can collect 15% of the next 250,000. Any amount over that, which is a total of 1.25 million dollars, an attorney can collect 10% against.
St. John’s Riverside Hospital Case
In 2006, a child was born in the severely understaffed St. John’s Riverside Hospital. Due to the lack of staff, the mother was not seen for several hours before she delivered the child. When she was seen, it was discovered that the child was in distress, and while an emergency C-section might have been performed at another facility, the case revealed that the staff at St. John’s chose not to due to being short staffed.
When the baby was born, he required oxygen immediately, and had seizures while in the nursery care. He developed cerebral palsy and a seizure condition that require him to have 24-hour care. He cannot feed himself, and has what medical professionals call “severe developmental delays.”
Early in this New York birth injury lawsuit, the doctor who was charged with malpractice settled for a sum of two million dollars outside the court. The hospital did not settle, and was later charged by a jury to pay 77.4 million dollars towards the future medical care of the boy. This amount was largely economic damages for the intensive medical care that has been and will be required.
Queens County Supreme Court
Another child born in 2006 was recently awarded 4.4 million dollars by a Queens county court, after the child developed a seizure disorder and neurological disabilities due to a birth injury sustained during an emergency C-section.
In this case, the patient suffered a hemorrhage in the brain during the procedure, which the plaintiff alleged that the doctors did not give proper medical attention to. The case alleged that the monitoring was lacking, that the C-section took too long to perform, and that the medical procedure to decrease the issues surrounding the hemorrhage were not followed. The court found in the plaintiff’s favor in 2013.
These cases required strict adherence to the laws of New York, including filing the lawsuit within the statute of limitations, and providing an expert witness to sign an affidavit before the case could begin. Both of these items can be taken care of by a birth injury attorney who specializes in medical malpractice suits in New York.
Sources:
http://injury-law.freeadvice.com/injury-law/birth-injury/new-york-birth-injury.htm
http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/medical-malpractice/laws-new-york.html