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If you were hurt because someone else was careless in New York, the legal question is rarely whether you have a case. It is whether the right deadlines were met, the right defendant was named, and the right layers of coverage were pursued. Most of the cases we see that go wrong went wrong in the first 90 days — not at trial.
Amparo Law Firm focuses on personal injury cases arising from premises liability, wrongful death, catastrophic injury, and adjacent negligence claims throughout New York City and the surrounding boroughs. Our work is built on federal-court legal craft and a working understanding of how the buildings, sidewalks, businesses, and public agencies you walked into actually operate.
We concentrate our personal injury practice on three areas:
Premises liability. Slip and fall, sidewalk and walkway defects, stairway falls, NYC snow and ice cases, landlord and building-owner liability, and NYCHA premises injuries.
Wrongful death and survivor claims. Wrongful death actions under New York’s Estates, Powers and Trusts Law, survivor and estate claims for the conscious pain and suffering of someone you lost, loss of consortium for a spouse, and pecuniary-loss damages.
Other negligence-based injuries. Dog bites, negligent security, lead paint exposure, retail and bodega premises, hotel and hospitality negligence, and burn injuries from preventable causes.
Construction site injuries and auto crashes are handled by our Construction Accident and Auto Accidents practices. Cases that cross categories — a worker struck by a vehicle in a work zone, or a passenger who developed a traumatic brain injury after a rideshare crash — are coordinated across practice areas in one matter.
Free case evaluation. No fee unless we recover for you.
New York negligence law is straightforward in its bones. To recover money damages for a personal injury, you generally have to show four things:
1. Duty. The person or business who hurt you owed you a reasonable standard of care under New York law. 2. Breach. They failed to meet that standard — by doing something they should not have done, or by failing to do something they should have done. 3. Causation. That failure was a substantial factor in causing your injury. 4. Damages. You suffered real, measurable harm — medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering, or loss of a family member.
The work of building a personal injury case is the work of proving each of those four elements with admissible evidence — and proving them against the right defendant, before the deadlines run.
New York is a jurisdiction of unforgiving deadlines. Missing one almost always ends the case before it begins.
Three years from the date of injury is the general statute of limitations for personal injury claims in New York (CPLR §214). For most slip-and-fall, dog-bite, and negligent-security cases, this is the clock.
Two years from the date of death is the statute of limitations for wrongful death actions in New York (EPTL §5-4.1). This is shorter than the personal-injury clock. Families often assume they have three years and find out otherwise too late.
Ninety days is the deadline to file a Notice of Claim if a public entity is involved — New York City, the MTA, NYCHA, the Health and Hospitals Corporation, a school district, or any other municipal body. Miss the 90 days and you generally lose the right to sue at all. See our Notice of Claim Guide for the full mechanics.
Thirty days is the deadline to file a no-fault PIP application if the personal injury arose out of a motor-vehicle crash. This applies even if the case feels like a pedestrian-injury case more than a “car accident” case. If you were on foot or on a bicycle when a vehicle hit you, no-fault still applies — and the 30 days still runs.
If you are not sure which of these deadlines applies to your situation, talk to a lawyer before you do anything else. The phone consultation is free.
When a worker is injured by a fall from height — or by an object falling from above — and the fall happened because the contractor or owner did not provide proper fall protection, the contractor and owner are liable. Period. The worker’s own conduct generally cannot be used as a defense unless it was the sole cause of the accident. This is called “absolute liability.” It is the most powerful tool an injured construction worker has, anywhere in the United States. Property owners and general contractors lobby every year to weaken §240. They have lobbied for thirty years. The law has not weakened.
§241(6) imposes liability on owners and contractors when a worker is injured because of a violation of a specific provision of New York’s Statutory Framework (12 NYCRR Part 23). The Statutory Framework covers everything from fall protection to electrical safety to demolition procedures to ventilation in confined spaces. Comparative fault applies under §241(6) — meaning if the worker was partly responsible, the recovery may be reduced — but the worker’s contributory negligence is generally not a complete bar to recovery the way it can be in other states.
§200 is the codification of common-law negligence — the duty an owner or contractor has to provide a reasonably safe work environment. It applies in two main ways: (1) when the owner or contractor knew or should have known of a dangerous condition, or (2) when they actually directed or controlled the work that produced the injury. §200 has more defenses available than §240 and §241(6), but it covers situations the other two statutes don’t reach.
Most New Yorkers think premises liability is a “she slipped, the store pays” situation. It is more specific than that, and the specifics decide cases.
Under Basso v. Miller, 40 N.Y.2d 233 (1976), every property owner in New York owes a single duty of “reasonable care under the circumstances” to everyone who enters the property — invited customer, tenant, friend, delivery worker, repair contractor. New York abandoned the old categories that protected landowners from liability to certain classes of visitors. The standard is uniform: reasonable care.
But to recover, you generally have to prove either:
Constructive notice is where most premises cases live or die. A puddle that formed thirty seconds before you slipped is generally not a winning case. A puddle that had been on the floor for two hours, with visible foot-traffic marks through it, often is. Surveillance footage, employee testimony, and the property’s own maintenance logs are the proof points.
Two special rules carve out their own bodies of law in NYC premises cases:
The “storm in progress” doctrine. New York courts generally do not require a property owner to clear snow or ice while precipitation is actively falling. The owner gets a reasonable amount of time after the storm ends before liability attaches. The question of when a “storm” ends — and what is reasonable in the cleanup window — is heavily litigated.
Open and obvious conditions. A hazard that any reasonable person would have seen and avoided is generally not the basis for a premises claim, though New York still allows comparative-fault analysis even where the hazard was visible. The condition’s visibility goes to your share of the fault, not to whether the case exists.
We represent people injured across the full range of New York personal injury matters:
Slip and fall · Sidewalk and walkway defect · Stairway and stairwell fall · NYC snow and ice (Admin Code §7-210) · Landlord and building-owner liability · NYCHA premises · Wrongful death · Survivor / estate claims · Loss of consortium · Catastrophic injury — TBI and spinal cord · Burn injury · Dog bite · Negligent security · Lead paint exposure (NYC) · Bodega and retail premises · Hotel and hospitality premises
If you fell on a New York City sidewalk, the right defendant is usually not the City.
Under New York City Administrative Code §7-210, the property owner adjacent to the sidewalk — not the City of New York — is responsible for keeping the sidewalk in safe condition for most properties. The exceptions are one-, two-, and three-family residential properties used exclusively for residential purposes, where the City retains responsibility.
This rule is one of the most common reasons New Yorkers’ premises cases get dismissed: the plaintiff named the City because the City owns the street, the City wins on summary judgment, and the 90-day Notice of Claim window has long since run against everyone else.
The first hour of a sidewalk case is title research. Who actually owns the abutting building. Who manages it. Whether it is a residential or mixed-use property. Whether the City has any colorable role under one of the §7-210 exceptions. Get that wrong and the rest of the file does not matter.
If you were injured in a New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) building, a city hospital, a public school, or any other premises owned or operated by a New York public entity, you have 90 days from the date of your injury to file a Notice of Claim under General Municipal Law §50-e. The action itself must be filed within one year and 90 days.
NYCHA premises cases are some of the strongest premises cases in New York — chronic deferred maintenance, documented complaints, lead paint exposure, defective elevators, defective stairways, and persistent rodent and pest issues. They are also the cases most often dismissed on Notice of Claim grounds, because the deadline is short and the family did not know it ran.
If you are inside the 90 days, you have time. If you are past the 90 days, there are limited paths to a late notice — under General Municipal Law §50-e(5) — but they require court permission and a showing of reasonable excuse. The earlier you talk to a lawyer in that window, the better.
If you lost a family member because of someone else’s negligence, New York law provides two distinct claims that work together. Most families think there is one claim. There are two, with different damages, different beneficiaries, and different proof.
The wrongful death action under EPTL §5-4.1 belongs to the personal representative of the estate, brought on behalf of the distributees — usually the spouse, children, and parents. The damages are pecuniary loss: the financial support, services, parental guidance, and inheritance the family lost because the person died. The two-year statute of limitations runs from the date of death.
The survival action under EPTL §11-3.2 belongs to the estate and covers what the person who died experienced before death — their conscious pain and suffering, their medical bills, their lost wages between injury and death. It is the claim the deceased person could have brought if they had survived.
The two claims are typically brought together. They are valued together. They are settled together. But they have different beneficiaries, and the distribution of any recovery follows EPTL rules — sometimes contested by family members who disagree on who was a distributee or how the recovery should split.
We approach wrongful death and survivor cases the same way we approach any catastrophic case: with the precision the family deserves and the discretion the loss requires.
A catastrophic injury — traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, severe burn injury, amputation, or any injury that fundamentally changes how you live the rest of your life — is a different category of case, both legally and operationally.
The damages model is different. So is the discovery. So is the medical record. A case involving a herniated disc is a fundamentally different file than a case involving a high cervical spinal cord injury with permanent quadriplegia, even if the underlying liability theory is similar. The catastrophic case requires life-care planning, economic-loss modeling, and treating-physician testimony that anticipates a 30- or 40-year horizon of medical needs.
These are the cases where the difference between adequate representation and excellent representation often shows up as a multiple in the recovery. We approach them with the federal-court documentation discipline that the case will eventually demand.
Pedigree Signal. Bob Amirian clerked for Chief Judge Sharon Prost on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and trained at Venable LLP. The federal-court approach to pleadings, motion practice, expert reports, and discovery shapes how every Amparo case is built — even when the case itself sits in New York Supreme Court.
Federal motion practice forces a level of precision in pleadings and a discipline in discovery that most plaintiff-side state-court PI work does not require. Sharper pleadings. Cleaner expert reports. Tighter theories of liability. Discovery organized the way a federal judge would want to see it.
That preparation matters. It produces better settlements — because the defense knows what the trial will look like — and when cases go to trial, it produces better trials.
Developer-side fluency. Jordan Sakni is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Amparo Law Firm. His background runs through NYC real estate development, private equity, and New York State financial regulation. He is not currently admitted to practice law; all legal services are performed by Bob Amirian and any other admitted attorneys at the firm.
What that operational background gives the firm, in premises cases specifically, is a working understanding of how buildings are actually maintained, how landlord-side risk decisions get made, and how property management companies negotiate the costs of preventable injury against the costs of prevention. Building-owner depositions read differently when the lawyer asking the questions has run a building. Lease provisions, certificate-of-occupancy questions, common-area maintenance contracts, vendor liability — these are not foreign documents. They are familiar.
The same is true for retail premises, hospitality premises, and any case where the defendant is a sophisticated commercial operator. We have a reasonable model in our heads of what their internal incentives look like, and we build the case around it.
We do not put dollar figures on a website. What your case is worth depends on the severity of the injury, the strength of the liability theory, the available insurance coverage, and the impact of the injury on your life and work. The damages categories under New York law are:
In a free consultation, we can give you a candid early read on what the case might look like and what would have to be true for it to be worth pursuing.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
Nothing up front. We work on contingency, which means our fee is a percentage of the recovery and is paid only if we recover money for you. If we do not recover, you owe us nothing. The fee structure is disclosed in writing before you sign anything.
Most premises and personal injury cases in New York take 18 to 36 months from filing to resolution. Severe and complex cases — catastrophic injuries, contested liability, multiple defendants — can take longer. Cases that settle pre-suit are faster. The honest answer is that we cannot give you a date, but we can tell you what stage your case is in at any given moment.
Most personal injury cases in New York settle before trial. That said, we prepare every case as if it will be tried. Settlement values are anchored by what the defense thinks the trial would look like — so a case prepared for trial settles for more than a case prepared only for settlement.
In most cases, yes. New York is a pure comparative-fault jurisdiction (CPLR §1411). Your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault, but you can still recover even if you were the majority cause of the injury. This is meaningfully more favorable to injured plaintiffs than the contributory-negligence rules in many other states.
Immigration status is generally not relevant to a personal injury case in New York. We have represented clients across a wide range of immigration situations, and the case proceeds the same way. Communications with us are protected by attorney-client privilege.
Get medical treatment. Document the scene if you can — photographs of the condition, the location, the time, the lighting. Identify witnesses and write down their names and contact information. Report the incident in writing if possible. Then call a lawyer before you talk to any insurance company.
Call (212) XXX-XXXX or use the form on this page. We respond within hours, in English, Spanish, or Farsi.
We are located at One World Trade Center in lower Manhattan and serve clients throughout the five boroughs and the surrounding metro area.
Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Jordan Sakni is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Amparo Law Firm PLLC. Mr. Sakni is not currently admitted to practice law. All legal services are performed by attorneys admitted in the relevant jurisdiction.
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