If a doctor, surgeon, or hospital in New York harmed you through negligence, a New York medical malpractice attorney at Silver Law Group can tell you whether you have a claim, and you pay nothing to find out. We represent patients and families hurt by medical negligence anywhere in the five boroughs and across New York State, and there is no fee unless you recover. Every case starts with a free consultation in English, Spanish, or Russian, and someone is available to take your call 24 hours a day.
Do You Have a Medical Malpractice Case in New York?
A bad medical outcome is not the same thing as malpractice. Medicine carries risk, and a treatment can fail even when every provider did their job correctly. To win a claim, you have to prove four separate things:
- Duty: a doctor-patient relationship existed, so the provider owed you a professional standard of care.
- Breach: the provider deviated from the accepted standard, meaning the care fell below what a competent provider in the same specialty would have done in the same situation.
- Causation: that deviation, and not the underlying illness or some other cause, is what injured you.
- Damages: you suffered real harm because of it, such as added surgery, permanent injury, or lost income.
The second element is where most cases are won or lost, and you cannot prove it with your own word. New York requires testimony from a qualified medical expert who reviews your records and states, on the record, that the provider departed from the accepted standard of care. That is why a strong case begins with expert review long before anyone files suit.
Types of Medical Malpractice Cases We Handle Across New York
Silver Law Group handles the full range of medical malpractice claims that arise across New York City and the state:
- Failure to diagnose and misdiagnosis — including missed cancer and stroke, where a delay in catching the condition let it worsen.
- Birth injuries to a mother or infant caused by mismanaged labor, delivery, or fetal monitoring.
- Surgical errors — from operating on the wrong site to leaving an instrument inside the body.
- Anesthesia errors — including dosing mistakes and failures to monitor the patient during a procedure.
- Medication and prescription errors — such as the wrong drug, the wrong dose, or a dangerous drug interaction that a provider should have caught.
- Hospital and emergency-room negligence — where understaffing, poor communication, or a missed warning sign leads to harm.
Each of these plays out somewhere specific — a hospital in one borough, a clinic in another — but the law that governs the claim is the same statewide.
What a New York Medical Malpractice Case Is Worth
A medical malpractice claim in New York can recover two kinds of damages. Economic damages cover what the negligence cost you in dollars: past and future medical bills, the price of long-term care, and the wages you lost while you could not work or will never earn again. Non-economic damages cover the harm that has no invoice, such as physical pain, suffering, and the loss of the activities and relationships that made your life your own.
New York stands apart from most states on one point that matters here. It places no statutory cap on non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases, so a jury is free to value your pain and loss on the facts in front of it rather than a legislative ceiling. Many states cut those awards off at a fixed figure; New York does not.
When malpractice kills a patient, the family can bring a wrongful death claim under EPTL 5-4.1. That recovery is measured differently — it centers on the financial support and services the surviving family lost — and it runs on its own deadline. We do not put a number on any case before the medical review is done, because the value follows the evidence, not a promise.
How Long You Have to File a Medical Malpractice Claim in New York
The deadline in a New York medical malpractice case is shorter than people expect, and missing it is almost always fatal to the claim. Once the statute of limitations runs out, the strength of your evidence stops mattering; the court will dismiss the case. The clocks that can apply are:
- The standard deadline: two years and six months (30 months) under CPLR 214-a, measured from the malpractice or from the end of continuous treatment for the same condition.
- The foreign-object exception: one year from the date you discovered, or reasonably should have discovered, an object left inside your body during a procedure.
- Lavern’s Law (CPLR 214-a): for a negligent failure to diagnose cancer or a malignant tumor, the clock runs 2.5 years from when you discovered or should have discovered the error, with a hard outer limit of seven years from the act itself.
- Wrongful death: two years from the date of death under EPTL 5-4.1.
- Minors: the clock is generally paused until the child reaches adulthood, but a claim cannot be brought more than 10 years after the malpractice.
More than one of these can run at the same time on a single case. The safest move is to have an attorney calculate every applicable deadline early, while there is still room to act.
Suing a New York City Public Hospital — the 90-Day Notice of Claim
Suing a city-run hospital works on a much tighter timeline than suing a private one. Many of New York City’s largest hospitals — Bellevue, Kings County, Elmhurst, and Jacobi among them — are operated by NYC Health + Hospitals, the public system. A claim against one of those facilities requires a Notice of Claim under General Municipal Law 50-e, filed within 90 days of the malpractice. That is not a lawsuit; it is a formal, sworn notice that must go in first, and 90 days is a fraction of the standard 30-month window.
New York also requires a certificate of merit under CPLR 3012-a, a document signed by your attorney confirming that a medical expert reviewed the case and found a reasonable basis for it. Both requirements take time to prepare correctly. If a public hospital treated you, the 90-day clock is the reason to call an attorney now rather than after you have recovered.
What It Costs to Hire a New York Medical Malpractice Lawyer
You pay nothing upfront to hire a New York medical malpractice lawyer at Silver Law Group. The fee comes only out of what you recover, and if there is no recovery, there is no fee — you owe nothing for the legal work itself. That is the contingency arrangement, and it exists so an injured patient can take on a hospital and its insurer without paying anyone by the hour.
Medical malpractice fees in New York are also lower than the fees in an ordinary injury case. Instead of the standard one-third, the law sets a descending sliding scale under Judiciary Law 474-a, so the attorney’s percentage shrinks as the recovery grows:
- 30% of the first $250,000 recovered
- 25% of the next $250,000
- 20% of the next $500,000
- 15% of the next $250,000
- 10% of any amount above $1,250,000
This scale is a statutory maximum, not something a firm negotiates upward, and the percentage is figured on the net recovery after case expenses. Those expenses — court fees, medical records, and the experts who review your care — are separate from the fee and are explained to you before you sign anything. The free consultation costs you nothing regardless of whether you hire us.
The Five Boroughs We Serve
Silver Law Group represents medical malpractice clients across all of New York City:
- Manhattan
- Brooklyn
- Queens
- The Bronx
- Staten Island
New York medical malpractice law is uniform across the five boroughs — the same statutes, the same deadlines, the same standard of care. What changes from borough to borough is which hospital treated you and which court hears the case. For the local detail on the hospitals and courts where you were hurt, follow the link to your borough’s page. This page is the citywide overview that connects them.
Why Injured Patients Across New York Choose Silver Law Group
Patients come to Silver Law Group for reasons you can verify before you ever hire us. The first consultation is free and offered in English, Spanish, and Russian, and the phone is answered 24/7. Representation is on contingency, so there is no fee unless you recover.
Hospital and insurance defense is well-funded and does not concede easily, and we build each file to be tried rather than to be settled cheaply. If your injury keeps you at home or in a hospital bed, the attorney can come to you.
Our office is in Midtown Manhattan at 49 West 37th Street, 7th Floor, and you can reach us at 212-470-4544.