New York is governed by serious injury threshold law. There’s nine categories.
And in New York, you not only have to prove that the defendant was liable for the accident, you also have to prove that you have a serious injury as defined by the law. The law defines the serious injury. And I’ll spare all the nuances of it. That’s for us to know and we can help you navigate that. But there are the obvious ones. Death, dismemberment, disfigurement, loss of a fetus. Also, a fracture is considered a serious injury. And then there are gray areas. They’re called 90/180, permanent consequential, significant limitation. And all of these are where it’s more of a gray area where the soft tissue injuries such as herniations and tears and things like that fall under.
In order to prove that you have a serious injury as defined by those aspects of the threshold law, we need to prove that you’re either unable to do your regular activities for 90 of the first 180 days following the accident or that you have a permanent limitation of use of part of your body or a significant limitation of use of part of your body. One of the easy ways to describe that is to say, I used to be able to raise my hand all the way up over my head and now I can’t. I can only raise my arm at 30°. That would be a limitation of use of my arm. So, that’s one way to look at it in layman’s terms.