If you or a family member has been injured in a slip and fall injury that may have been caused by the negligence of a property or business owner, you should consider exploring the possible legal options available to you. If you have suffered pain, loss of wages, and other expenses, and the stress of uncertainty about the future, consider speaking with an injury lawyer with a long history of successfully litigated cases and on behalf of deserving clients. For decades, Rosenberg, Minc, Falkoff & Wolff have been helping injured New Yorkers get the money they needed for covering costs of treatment, recovery, therapy, and more. Find out how they might help you by calling chatting online with an agent or calling 212-344-1000 and speaking with a representative.
Statistics reveal that slip & fall injuries account for over a million emergency room visits each year. Pain and suffering from the injury is compounded by the additional burdens of bills and stress, treatment alternatives, additional transportation needs or childcare needs, and other changes. If you feel that your accident was due to mismanagement, neglect, a failure to warn of unsafe conditions, seek the advice of expert injury lawyers Rosenberg, Minc, Falkoff & Wolff. We’ve helped many NYC injury victims get money deserved and needed, so they could focus on healing and get back to planning for the future.
Accident injury attorneys are all too aware that sometimes even painful injuries are initially under-estimated by someone without medical qualifications. There many areas of the human body that typically sustain injuries in a bad accident. It’s imperative that medical staff examine and diagnose any injuries sustained, to prevent delays in receiving proper treatment. In some circumstances, the person who slipped and fell felt pressured to return to work, to go home and rest, or complete an incident report, before being medically evaluated, which can lead to additional problems.
Just as failure to seek professional medical advice quickly might cause other problems, the same can be said for seeking legal advice. Under-estimated injuries mean under-estimated expenses, too. We are familiar with the ranges of costs for medical and related needs, and of damages recovered for past claims. They know the restrictions and obstacles for slip/fall claims, types of statutes of limitations, windows of opportunity, etc. They can quickly determine the strengths of a claim or whether it can be strengthened to get the most successful result possible.
The following conditions must be established with proof that the:
Long, long ago, English landlords were protected from claims of accidents and other such occurrences on their property by the concept of the injured party having to prove notice in order to recover damages for a serious accident. Still today, your injury lawyer must establish notice, or the court may dismiss the case, even if your accident was caused on the premises by an unsafe condition.
Constructive Notice
If, for example, you slipped and fell on the icy pavement outside a grocery store, and you wondered if you might get some kind of settlement that would cover the extensive medical bills following your injury. It may be legally required to prove that constructive notice was given to the owner because icy conditions existed for a period of time long enough for the landlord/owner to have known that the ice was there and to spread salt and gravel to fix it, but neglect to do it anyway.
Similarly, a claim for an injury you got tripping and falling when a step beneath your foot crumbled, as you walked down the stairs in front of your apartment building, might require proving constructive notice-– that the landlord must have known of the unsafe condition but failed to fix it. Without obtaining proof of notice, the claim would be difficult to pursue.
Actual Notice
Another type of notice that might have to be proven is actual notice, in which a landlord or owner of premises was actually told or warned of an unsafe condition and neglected to address it. This might include some kind of formal inspection report which mentioned the hazard, a posting of such a hazard, or information about the hazard that the landlord received from another source. If the attorney proves that the landlord had actually been informed of the unsafe condition, and still failed to rectify it, that is called actual notice.
A trained and capable NYC accident injury lawyer should know when and which professionals such as engineers, investigators, etc., should be consulted and utilized for their opinions and reports. An engineer might examine a scene of an accident and produce a report detailing what contributed to the development of the crumbling step. It may reveal that the stair rail was rusting and loose, exposed nails were weak and rotten and that the condition had been present for quite some time. Lawyers for accident cases routinely work with many experts, depending on the circumstances. An investigator might try to determine whether previous violations were issued but ignored. In such cases, the lawyer might use the findings of these experts to prove that notice was established, and the claim for damage recovery for your injury can proceed to the next stage.
Basic documentation to support your claim might include:
Good communication between you and your attorney means asking and answering questions, sharing knowledge, and being responsive, so if you have or learn information that could be useful, share it with your attorney.
If a victim or family files a claim or lawsuit to recover compensation from a property owner after an accident, the property owner’s attorneys or insurance company may attempt to argue that the victim is responsible for a portion of the blame for slipping and falling.
Examples of attributing this partial blame are that that the victim wasn’t paying attention, not wearing appropriate or required safety gear, or that the injury happened in an area that was off-limits to visitors. It’s possible that a jury may find that the rule of comparative negligence is appropriate and apportion 10% of the fault to the victim. Any damages awarded to the victim will be reduced by the same percentage. An award of $100,000 to a victim who was found to be 10% at fault, would be reduced accordingly, by 10% to $90,000. A very skilled lawyer for claims is crucial to know how to keep any attributed comparative negligence attributed to the victim to a minimum.
We work in all boroughs, so if are looking for the best lawyers for slip and fall near me, or you’re searching for a Brooklyn, Queens or Manhattan attorney, we represent a team of some of the best lawyers in New York City in this practice area. We want to bring the same dedication to winning your case that helped achieve the successful settlements we fought for with our past clients. Wherever you are, call us for a free consultation. We can answer some of your questions and you’ll learn whether we can offer you representation.
Falls are not a minor category of injury in this state. The New York State Department of Health describes fall-related injuries as the leading cause of injury hospitalizations for children ages 0 to 14 and for adults 25 and older, and puts the cost of those hospitalizations at $1.3 billion a year in New York State alone. The trend is also going the wrong way: between 2018 and 2023 the Department found the rate of fall-related hospitalizations among New Yorkers 60 and older rose 13 percent, and the rate of fall-related emergency department visits rose 15 percent. Sources: New York State Department of Health, Fall Injuries, and the Department’s October 2025 announcement on falls prevention programs.
Fall cases have been part of this firm’s practice for decades. Among the recoveries listed on our results page is $1.15 million awarded by a jury to a slip-and-fall victim, reported in the New York Law Journal. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
Two very different timetables can apply, and which one you are on depends on who controls the property. A fall on privately held property, a store, an apartment building or an office, generally leaves three years from the date of the fall to begin a lawsuit, and a fatal fall generally leaves two years measured from the death. A fall on premises controlled by a public entity, such as a city building, a public housing development, a school, a park or a transit facility, is a different exercise entirely. With many city and local government defendants a written notice of claim generally has to be served within 90 days of the injury; other public entities apply similarly short procedures of their own, so the exact clock depends on which entity controls the property. Where such a procedure applies, the lawsuit generally has to be commenced far inside the usual three-year window, and by how much depends on the entity. Ninety days can pass while you are still in physical therapy, so if there is any chance a public entity owns or maintains the place where you fell, have the owner identified within days rather than months.
In most of New York City, responsibility for maintaining the sidewalk in front of a building sits with the owner of the adjoining property, not the City, which is why sidewalk cases are usually brought against a landlord or a business. There is an important exception: where the sidewalk adjoins a one, two or three family home that the owner lives in and that is used only as a residence, the City may be the responsible party, and that changes both who you sue and how fast you have to act. Snow and ice add their own timing rules about how long an owner has to clear a walkway after snowfall stops. See our pages on sidewalk accidents and snow and ice falls for how those claims differ.
Frequently, yes. Witnesses help, but they are not the only proof. Store and building surveillance footage, maintenance and cleaning logs, prior complaints about the same hazard, inspection records, violation histories, and the physical condition itself all build the notice case described above. Your own photographs, taken at the scene with the shoes and clothing you were wearing, are often especially useful. The pressure is on timing rather than on witnesses: surveillance is routinely overwritten within days, and a wet floor or a broken step gets cleaned or repaired quickly. The sooner a lawyer can send a preservation demand, the more of that record survives.
There is no schedule, and a number quoted before anyone has reviewed your records is a guess. What actually drives value is the severity and permanence of the injury, the medical treatment it required and will require, the earnings you lost and will lose, the strength of the proof that the owner knew or should have known about the hazard, the insurance available on the defendant’s side, and the share of fault a jury might assign to you. A fractured wrist that heals and a hip fracture that ends independent living are not the same case, even if the puddle was identical.
Two separate tracks can run at once. Workers compensation generally covers medical treatment and a portion of lost wages regardless of fault, but it does not pay for pain and suffering and it usually cannot be brought against your own employer as a lawsuit. Where a third party is responsible, for example the owner of a building your employer does not own, a cleaning contractor, or a property manager, a separate injury claim against that third party may be available alongside the compensation claim. Falls at construction sites carry their own additional protections. It is worth having both tracks reviewed rather than assuming compensation is the end of it.
Rosenberg, Minc, Falkoff & Wolff has a long history of winning, but we never stop paying attention to changes in laws, codes, regulations, requirements, that any changes to the landscape of the practice area and how potential claims might be affected. Efficient representation and clear communication is important to us and should be to you, too. You want to spend your time healing and recovering, and we want to spend our time ensuring you get the money you deserve to do just that.
