When a Buffalo resident suffers a personal injury in a car accident, whether that person can pursue a personal injury claim is governed by New York State’s No-Fault Law. Under this system, the injured party must have suffered a “serious injury” before a personal injury case may be pursued.
The law defining what constitutes a serious injury was written many years ago, and there have been great advances in medicine since then. As a result, the New York State legislature is in the preliminary stages of considering the addition of new categories to the legal definition of serious injury.
While the current definition of serious injury includes some clearly objective injuries such as dismemberment or fractures, it also includes much more vague definitions, such as “permanent consequential limitation” and “significant limitation.” While the proposed changes do not eliminate these vague categories, they do add several new, more objective categories to the definitions.
These changes were deemed necessary by the sponsors of the bill because the current system often leads to seemingly unfair situations. For example, a person with a broken toe may, by law, pursue a serious injury claim because he or she suffered a fracture. In contrast, a person who has suffered several torn knee ligaments must prove that this injury fits within one of the more vague categories of serious injury, or the case may be dismissed.
The proposed new categories largely consist of injuries that were not easily detectible when the original law was written, but now are much more easily diagnosed by doctors. The proposed new categories are:
- a partial or complete tear or impingement of a nerve, tendon, ligament, muscle or cartilage;
- injury to any part of the spinal column that results in injury to an intervertebral disc;
- impingement of the spinal cord, spinal canal, nerve, tendon or muscle;
- surgery.
This bill is still in the very early stages of the legislative process and, if it survives at all, is likely to be modified before being passed.
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