A Manhattan medical malpractice lawyer at Silver Law Group can review your records and tell you in a free consultation whether New York law lets you sue over the error. We handle doctor and hospital negligence claims throughout Manhattan. That includes private physicians, the borough’s major teaching hospitals and the city-run hospitals, which have much shorter deadlines.
The hospital already has lawyers and an insurer reading your chart. You should have an attorney reading it too. You pay nothing up front, and you owe no fee unless your case recovers money. Call 212-470-4544 at any hour to speak with an attorney in English, Spanish or Russian, or ask us to come to your hospital room or home.
What Counts as Medical Malpractice in New York
A bad outcome is not malpractice on its own. Medicine carries real risk, and New York holds a provider liable only when you can prove four elements:
- Duty. A doctor-patient relationship existed. Admission paperwork, appointment history or an emergency-room triage note usually proves it.
- Departure from accepted practice. The doctor, nurse or hospital did something a reasonably careful provider in the same specialty would not have done, or skipped something that provider would have done. You prove this through testimony from a physician in that field. Your own account of the visit is not enough.
- Causation. The departure caused your injury or made it worse. Expect the defense to admit a misstep and then argue that your illness would have taken the same course without it.
- Damages. The error left you with real harm, such as another surgery, a permanent limitation, lost work or pain you would not otherwise have.
If you cannot prove one element, the case fails even when the other three are strong. A missed fracture that healed normally anyway may show a departure but no damages.
New York also screens cases before they can be filed. Under CPLR 3012-a, the complaint must include a certificate in which your attorney states that he or she reviewed the facts and consulted a licensed physician who agrees the case has merit. That is why a responsible attorney for medical malpractice asks for your records before promising anything. By the time a case is filed, a doctor has already reviewed it.
Common Malpractice Claims at Manhattan Hospitals
Manhattan patients are treated at NYU Langone, NewYork-Presbyterian, Mount Sinai, Lenox Hill, Memorial Sloan Kettering and Hospital for Special Surgery. A famous name does not lower the standard of care a hospital is held to. It also does not make a claim against that hospital any weaker. These errors happen at large institutions just as they do at small ones:
- Misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis, such as a tumor read as benign on a scan or a heart attack sent home as indigestion. Your injury is the time the disease had to progress.
- Surgical errors, including operating on the wrong site, cutting a blood vessel or organ without catching it before closing, or leaving a sponge inside the body
- Anesthesia errors: an overdose, a missed allergy, or a sedated patient left unmonitored while oxygen levels fell
- Birth injuries. A delayed C-section after the fetal monitor showed distress can starve a baby’s brain of oxygen. Too much force during delivery can damage the nerves of the baby’s arm.
- Medication errors at any point in the chain, from the wrong drug ordered by the doctor to the wrong dose given at the bedside
- Emergency-room failures, where a patient is triaged as low priority, discharged before test results come back, or never given the CT scan the symptoms called for
The hospital’s specialty shapes the claim. A case against Memorial Sloan Kettering is usually measured against cancer-care standards. A case against Hospital for Special Surgery is measured against orthopedic standards. Doctor malpractice attorneys have to match the reviewing expert to that specialty, because a general practitioner’s opinion will not hold up against a defense expert from the same field as the treating surgeon.
Suing the Hospital vs. the Doctor
Who employed the person who made the mistake decides who pays for it. At Manhattan’s teaching hospitals, residents, fellows and staff nurses are hospital employees, and the hospital is legally responsible for their negligence. A private attending physician who admits patients to the hospital but runs an independent practice is treated differently. That doctor generally answers for his or her own errors through a separate malpractice policy.
One operation can involve both kinds of defendant. Say a private surgeon decides to operate, a resident closes the incision, and a nurse misses signs of internal bleeding during recovery. You would have a claim against the hospital for the resident and the nurse, and a separate claim against the surgeon.
Name every responsible defendant in the original complaint. The defendants you leave out tend to become the ones everyone else blames at trial, and by then the deadline to add them may have passed. Hospital malpractice lawyers identify those people from the chart itself, using the signatures on orders, the nursing flow sheets and the timestamp on each entry.
What Your Malpractice Claim Is Worth
What your claim is worth depends on what the error cost you, now and for the rest of your life. New York splits damages into two groups.
Economic damages are the losses with a paper trail:
- Past and future medical bills, including corrective surgery and therapy
- Lost wages, and lower earning capacity if you cannot go back to the same work
- Home care, medical equipment and changes to your home
- Out-of-pocket costs such as travel to treatment
Non-economic damages have no receipt:
- Pain and suffering
- Loss of enjoyment of life, meaning the activities the injury has taken from you
- Disfigurement and the mental strain of living with a permanent injury
New York has no cap on malpractice damages. A jury sets the amount for pain and suffering based on the evidence, and no statute reduces it to a preset ceiling. That makes the proof of your future needs especially important, including your treating doctors’ opinions, a life-care plan and projections of lost earnings.
Death cases follow a narrower rule. Under EPTL 5-4.3, the family can recover only financial losses: the income and support the person would have provided, the value of household services and parental guidance, and medical and funeral costs. Grief is not compensated. The Grieving Families Act would have changed that, but it was vetoed on December 5, 2025, so every Manhattan wrongful death claim is still limited to financial losses.
What a Manhattan Medical Malpractice Lawyer Costs
You do not pay a Silver Law Group attorney by the hour, and you pay nothing to start. We work on a contingency fee. The fee is a percentage of the money your case recovers, and it is paid from the settlement or verdict at the end. If there is no recovery, there is no fee.
In medical malpractice cases, New York law sets the percentage. Judiciary Law 474-a sets a sliding scale. The fee is 30 percent of the first portion of the recovery, then 25, 20 and 15 percent of each later portion, and 10 percent of anything above the top tier. Because the rate drops as the recovery grows, the attorney takes a smaller share of a large case than a flat percentage would allow.
The scale is applied to the net recovery, meaning what remains after case expenses are paid. In malpractice work those expenses include expert physician reviews, records fees, court filing costs and deposition transcripts. Because expenses come out first, the fee is calculated on a smaller figure, and you keep more of the recovery.
Deadlines to File a Medical Malpractice Lawsuit in New York
You get less time to file a malpractice suit in New York than most other injury claims, and a missed deadline ends the case no matter how strong it is. The main deadline comes from CPLR 214-a:
- Two and a half years from the act or omission. If you kept seeing the same provider for the same condition, the clock starts at the last visit of that continuous treatment instead.
- One year from discovery when a foreign object, such as a sponge or surgical clamp, was left in your body. The year runs from when you found it, or when you reasonably should have.
- Seven years at most for a missed cancer diagnosis under Lavern’s Law. The two and a half years run from when you knew or should have known of the error, but never more than seven years after the act itself.
- Ten years at most for children. CPLR 208 pauses the clock while the patient is under 18, but a malpractice claim for a child cannot be filed more than ten years after the act.
- Two years from the date of death for a wrongful death claim, under EPTL 5-4.1.
These dates apply to private doctors and hospitals. A medical malpractice attorney should work out your exact deadline in the first consultation, because continuous treatment and discovery rules can move it in either direction.
Claims Against Public and VA Hospitals in Manhattan
The deadlines above apply to private hospitals and practices. If New York City or the federal government runs the hospital, you must file a formal claim with that government before you can sue, and the first deadline can be as short as 90 days. If your care took place at a city hospital or the VA, contact a lawyer within weeks of the injury.
Bellevue, Harlem and Metropolitan Hospital Claims
Bellevue, Harlem Hospital and Metropolitan Hospital are run by NYC Health + Hospitals, the city’s public hospital system. The two deadlines for these claims are:
- 90 days to serve a notice of claim under General Municipal Law 50-e
- One year and 90 days to file the lawsuit under General Municipal Law 50-i
The notice of claim goes to NYC Health + Hospitals, not the New York City Comptroller. It is easy to get this wrong. The Comptroller handles claims against most other city agencies, so patients and their families often assume it handles the public hospitals too. Serving the wrong office can cost you the claim.
The notice describes when and where the malpractice happened and what injuries it caused. Ninety days goes by fast when you are recovering from surgery or caring for an injured child. A court can sometimes allow a late notice, but that takes a motion and approval is never guaranteed. File on time instead of counting on that exception.
Manhattan VA Medical Center Claims
The Manhattan VA Medical Center, at the Margaret Cochran Corbin Campus at 423 East 23rd Street, is a federal facility. Malpractice by its doctors and staff falls under federal law, not New York’s rules. You cannot start with a lawsuit in state court.
Under 28 U.S.C. 2401(b), you must first file a written claim with the VA within two years of the injury. If the VA denies it, you have six months from the date the denial is mailed to file suit in federal court. Two years sounds generous next to the city’s 90 days. It is still a hard cutoff, and the six-month window after a denial is short.
Why Choose Silver Law Group
These are the practical terms of working with us:
- An office in Midtown Manhattan at 49 West 37th Street, 7th Floor
- Consultations in English, Spanish and Russian, so you and your family can explain what happened in the language you are most comfortable in
- Availability 24/7. If a family member is still in the hospital tonight, call tonight.
- An attorney who comes to your hospital bedside or your home when you cannot travel
- Trial-ready preparation from the first day. Records, expert reviews and depositions are prepared as if a jury will hear the case, because insurers base their offers on whether your attorney is ready to try it.
Talk to an attorney for hospital negligence before you sign anything the hospital or its insurer sends you. Call 212-470-4544 for a free consultation. Bring whatever records you have, or none at all. We can request the rest, and you owe nothing unless the case recovers.