Cortland Office

Cortland was incorporated as a city in 1900. The city is served by I-81, U.S. Route 11, New York State Route 281, New York State Route 41, and New York State Route 13. Serious accidents on the road, in a hospital, or in other settings can dramatically and permanently change your life. If you are injured due to another person or company's fault in Cortland, you may be able to recover damages by filing a personal injury lawsuit. At DeFrancisco & Falgiatano, LLP, our Cortland personal injury lawyers are ready to provide you with aggressive and knowledgeable legal representation after an accident caused by someone else so that you can rest and recover. We have offices at 26 Court Street in Cortland, among other locations.

There are many different situations in which a simple mistake can result in devastating injuries. For example, if an interstate truck driver decides to work beyond the hours of service in order to make a delivery, he may be too fatigued to stay in his lane one night and crash into a family in the car next to him. If a janitor fails to put up orange cones after mopping a restaurant restroom, meanwhile, an elderly customer may slip and fall and fracture her hip.

In most cases, you will need to prove a defendant's negligence in order to recover compensatory damages. Negligence has several elements: duty, breach of duty, actual and proximate causation, and actual damages. These must be proven by a preponderance of the evidence.

When a defendant violates a safety law or regulation, and the result is injuries of the type that the law or regulation was designed to forestall, a personal injury attorney in the Cortland area may be able to establish negligence per se, or negligence as a matter of law. For example, when a truck driver violates hours of service rules, he may be found negligent per se for causing a crash. Negligence per se can be helpful for plaintiffs because it shifts the focus of the case to the extent of the damages, rather than whether they should be paid.

In another context, a doctor, nurse, or other health care provider is required to follow the accepted standards and practices of the medical community. If a health care provider violates the accepted standards and practices of their specialty and causes injuries to a patient, they can be held liable for medical malpractice. In some cases, causation is more complicated in medical malpractice cases than in certain other types of personal injury cases.

For example, if a doctor fails to diagnose breast cancer, a Cortland personal injury attorney will need to show that the damages sustained by the patient are results of the failure to diagnose breast cancer, rather than the breast cancer itself. Generally, early detection of breast cancer, as well as early treatment, is more likely to result in survival. A failure to diagnose can be a result of many different mistakes, including a failure to list breast cancer as a potential diagnosis during differential diagnosis, a failure to order a mammogram, a misreading of test results, or a failure to do a biopsy of a lump.

Simply showing a bad outcome, such as death, is not enough to show medical malpractice. You need to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that you had a doctor-patient relationship with the defendant, the defendant breached the professional standard of care, and the breach caused you actual damages. This is the same standard as for birth injury cases, which are a subset of medical malpractice cases.

Sometimes negligence results in a wrongful death. A decedent's personal representative brings the wrongful death lawsuit. Family members are not allowed to sue for a wrongful death unless they are serving as the personal representatives of the decedent’s estate. Damages that can be recovered in a wrongful death lawsuit include burial costs, hospital bills, lost wages, loss of the value of parental services to surviving children, loss of household services performed by a child for surviving parents, and the decedent's conscious pain and suffering after being injured but prior to their death.

Whether you are injured or a loved one is killed as a result of negligence in Upstate New York, the skillful attorneys at DeFrancisco & Falgiatano may be able to help. Call us at 833-200-2000 or contact us via our online form. We offer a free consultation to discuss your legal options and handle our cases on a contingency basis to protect your financial stability.