A Brooklyn medical malpractice lawyer at Silver Law Group can review what happened to you in a free consultation. The consultation is available 24/7 in English, Spanish and Russian at 212-470-4544. Some Brooklyn hospitals have a 90-day notice deadline, and most patients don’t learn about it until it has already passed. That is why the first call matters more than people expect.
You may need a hospital negligence lawyer because a nurse missed a falling oxygen level overnight. Or you may need a doctor malpractice attorney because a surgeon operated on the wrong knee. Both cases start the same way. We get your full medical chart and have a physician in the right specialty read it. Then we tell you in plain words whether your care fell below the standard New York law requires.
The consultation costs nothing, and you pay no fee unless you recover. If you are still a patient at Maimonides or Kings County Hospital, an attorney can come to your bedside. If you are recovering at home in Bay Ridge or Bushwick, we come there.
Do You Have a Medical Malpractice Case in Brooklyn?
New York courts use four elements to separate malpractice from a bad result. Your claim has to prove all four:
- A provider agreed to treat you. An emergency room visit, a clinic appointment or a hospital admission creates that provider-patient relationship.
- Your care departed from accepted medical practice. In other words, a reasonably careful provider in the same specialty would have acted differently in the same situation.
- That departure caused your injury or made it worse. If the illness simply ran its course, this element fails.
- You suffered real damages, such as another surgery, lost function, lost wages, lasting pain or the death of a family member.
The line between a poor outcome and malpractice is a choice someone made. A patient with aggressive cancer can die after flawless treatment. A hip replacement can loosen in a body that heals badly. Neither one is malpractice. The same death becomes a case when a biopsy report sat unread in the chart for four months, because a competent doctor would have acted on it and the delay took treatment options away.
Causation is usually where the defense pushes back first. The hospital’s lawyers will argue that your outcome would have been the same with perfect care. To answer that, your attorney needs a physician who can explain, in medical terms, what an earlier diagnosis or the correct procedure would have changed for you.
Misdiagnosis, Surgical, Medication and Birth Injury Errors
Most Brooklyn malpractice claims fall into a handful of error types. Each example below shows the kind of facts that can turn into a case.
- Missed cancer diagnosis. A radiologist reads a lung nodule on a CT scan as harmless and orders no follow-up. The tumor is found a year later, after it has spread.
- An emergency physician treats slurred speech and one-sided weakness as an inner-ear problem and sends you home. That is a missed stroke, and it lets the stroke advance past the window when clot-dissolving treatment could have limited the damage.
- Wrong-site surgery. The surgeon operates on the left knee when the consent form and the imaging both say right.
- Medication errors, such as a nurse hanging an IV bag meant for another patient or a prescriber ordering a drug your chart lists as an allergy.
- Anesthesia errors. No one watches the oxygen monitor during sedation for a routine procedure, and the patient wakes up with brain damage.
- Delayed C-section. The fetal heart tracing shows distress for an hour while the delivery team waits. The baby is born with an oxygen-deprivation injury that can lead to cerebral palsy.
Every one of these errors leaves a paper trail. Imaging reports, medication administration records, anesthesia flow sheets and fetal monitor strips are the evidence. That is why requesting them is the first thing we do.
Suing a Brooklyn Hospital for Negligence
Malpractice claims against Brooklyn’s private hospitals are filed in Kings County Supreme Court under the standard malpractice deadline. These hospitals include:
- Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park
- NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn in Sunset Park
- NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital in Park Slope
- The Brooklyn Hospital Center in Fort Greene
- Brookdale Hospital Medical Center
- Interfaith Medical Center
A hospital is legally responsible for mistakes made by the people it employs. The doctrine is called vicarious liability. Say an employed nurse gives the wrong dose, or a resident on an overnight shift misses a post-surgical bleed. The hospital answers for that mistake as if the institution made it. You don’t have to show that the hospital’s leadership did anything wrong. You only have to show that its employee departed from accepted practice while doing the job.
This shapes who an attorney for hospital negligence names in the lawsuit. Nurses, residents and staff technicians usually fall under the hospital. A private attending physician who only has admitting privileges may not be a hospital employee. When that is the case, we name that doctor separately, and the employment records decide who belongs in the case.
Kings County, Woodhull and South Brooklyn Health Claims
Kings County Hospital in East Flatbush, Woodhull in north Brooklyn and South Brooklyn Health in Coney Island are all NYC Health + Hospitals facilities. Because they are public hospitals run by the city’s health system, a much shorter set of rules applies:
- Within 90 days of the malpractice, you must serve a Notice of Claim under General Municipal Law §50-e. The notice states who was hurt, when and where it happened, and what the injury is.
- Within one year and 90 days, you must file the lawsuit itself.
The 2.5-year rule that covers Maimonides or Methodist does not help you at these three hospitals. If the 90 days pass without a notice, your only option is to ask a judge for permission to file late, and the judge can say no. If you were treated at any of these facilities, call before you do anything else.
SUNY Downstate Claims in the Court of Claims
SUNY Downstate is a state-run hospital. That means claims against it skip Kings County Supreme Court entirely and go to the New York State Court of Claims. Court of Claims Act §10(3) requires you to serve either the claim itself or a notice of intention to file a claim on the New York Attorney General within 90 days of the malpractice. A notice of intention served on time extends your window to file the full claim to two years. If you miss the 90 days, the case starts with a fight over whether it can go forward at all.
What Is a Brooklyn Medical Malpractice Case Worth?
We don’t put a number on your case in the first phone call. An honest value depends on the medical records, the expert review and your prognosis. The categories of damages are fixed by law, though.
Economic damages are the losses you can document:
- Past and future medical bills, including corrective surgery and rehabilitation
- Lost wages, plus lost earning capacity if you can’t return to your job
- Home care, medical equipment and changes to your home
- Out-of-pocket costs such as prescriptions and travel to treatment
Non-economic damages cover pain and suffering, loss of enjoyment of life, disfigurement and the strain on your marriage.
New York has no cap on malpractice damages. A jury in Kings County can award whatever the evidence supports. Some other states limit pain and suffering by statute, but New York does not.
Comparative fault under CPLR 1411 can reduce what you receive, but it does not wipe out your claim. Suppose a jury finds you 20 percent responsible for skipping a follow-up appointment. Your award drops by 20 percent, and you still recover the rest.
Wrongful death claims are narrower. When malpractice kills a patient, New York limits the family’s recovery to pecuniary loss. That covers the income and support the person would have provided, plus medical and funeral expenses. Grief itself is not compensated. The Grieving Families Act would have expanded these damages, but it was vetoed in December 2025, so the pecuniary-loss limit still applies.
What a Brooklyn Medical Malpractice Attorney Costs
Silver Law Group handles malpractice cases on contingency. You pay nothing up front and nothing by the hour. The fee is a percentage taken out of the settlement or verdict when the case ends. If there is no recovery, there is no fee.
In medical malpractice cases, New York sets the maximum percentage by statute. Judiciary Law §474-a caps the fee on a sliding scale:
- 30% of the first $250,000
- 25% of the next $250,000
- 20% of the next $500,000
- 15% of the next $250,000
- 10% of anything above $1.25 million
The percentage drops as the recovery grows, so a larger share of a larger award stays with you. Every medical claim attorney in New York works under the same scale. We explain the math in writing before you sign anything.
Deadlines to File a Medical Malpractice Lawsuit in New York
The clock starts on the day of the error, not the day you realize something went wrong. That rule has a few exceptions.
- Under CPLR 214-a, most malpractice claims must be filed within 2.5 years of the error. If the same provider kept treating you for the same condition, the 2.5 years run from your last visit instead. This is called the continuous treatment rule.
- If a surgeon left a foreign object inside you, such as a sponge or an instrument, you have one year from when you discovered it, or reasonably should have.
- Wrongful death claims must be filed within two years of the death under EPTL 5-4.1.
Claims against the city hospitals and SUNY Downstate described above run on much shorter notice deadlines.
Missed Cancer Diagnoses and Injured Children
A missed cancer diagnosis follows a discovery rule. The 2.5 years start when you knew, or reasonably should have known, about the error and the harm it caused. No lawsuit can be filed more than seven years after the error itself. So a mammogram misread in 2020 and caught in 2025 can still support a claim, while one misread a decade ago usually cannot.
For children, CPLR 208 pauses the clock during childhood, but in malpractice cases that extension cannot exceed ten years from the error. For a birth injury, that usually means filing before the child turns ten.
Why Brooklyn Patients Choose Silver Law Group
Injured patients often can’t travel, so we go to them. An attorney will meet you at your home in Flatbush or at your bedside in a Brooklyn hospital, often before discharge, while the details are still fresh.
What you get when you hire us as your medical malpractice attorney:
- A free consultation, available 24/7, in English, Spanish or Russian, so your family can take part in their own language
- Physician review of your chart before we ask you to commit to a lawsuit
- Trial-ready preparation from the first day, with experts lined up and depositions handled as if a jury will read every transcript
- A straight answer about weak spots in your case, including comparative fault and causation problems
- No fee unless you recover
Our office is at 49 West 37th Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10018, in Midtown Manhattan. Clients from Brooklyn meet us there or at home, whichever is easier for them. We have no Brooklyn branch, and we won’t pretend to.
Talk to a Brooklyn Medical Malpractice Lawyer Today
Call 212-470-4544 at any hour, or fill out the online form, for a free consultation with a Brooklyn medical malpractice lawyer. Ask the hospital for your complete records now, before you call if you can. A Notice of Claim against Kings County, Woodhull or South Brooklyn Health is due within 90 days of the error. Every week you wait comes out of that time.