Car insurance claims in New York

New York pays the first layer of a crash through its own no-fault system. Section 5104(a) of the Insurance Law removes the right to recover non-economic loss from another covered person unless the injury is a serious injury, and removes the right to recover basic economic loss at all. Serious injury is defined at § 5102(d) by a list: death, dismemberment, significant disfigurement, a fracture, loss of a fetus, permanent loss of use of a body organ or system, permanent consequential limitation, significant limitation, and an injury preventing the person from performing substantially all of their usual daily activities for ninety of the one hundred eighty days after the accident. Most disputed New York injury claims turn on that last limb, and the medical record either supports it or it does not.

Shared fault is handled generously by comparison with most states. Under C.P.L.R. § 1411 the claimant’s own culpable conduct, contributory negligence and assumption of risk included, does not bar recovery at all; damages are simply reduced in proportion to it. A driver found seventy percent responsible still recovers thirty percent of the loss. There is no percentage above which recovery stops, which is what pure comparative negligence means and why New York litigation argues about how much fault to assign rather than about who crosses a threshold.

The court deadlines are three years for personal injury and three years for injury to property (C.P.L.R. § 214(5) and (4)), and six years to sue on the policy as a contract (§ 213(2)). Separately, an accident in which anyone is killed or injured, or in which any one person’s property is damaged by more than one thousand dollars, must be reported in writing to the Commissioner within ten days (Vehicle and Traffic Law § 605(a)(1)). That is a driver’s duty to the state, distinct from notifying your insurer, which the policy will require far sooner.

First-party no-fault benefits are overdue if not paid within thirty days after the claimant supplies proof of the fact and amount of the loss; overdue payments carry two percent a month and a reasonable attorney’s fee (Insurance Law § 5106(a)). The deadlines an insurer works to on other kinds of auto claim are set by the Department of Financial Services in 11 NYCRR 216, which could not be read for this page, so they are not stated here. Every policy must include uninsured motorist coverage at $25,000 per person injured and $50,000 for a death, with no written-rejection route (§ 3420(f)(1)); supplementary underinsured cover is at the insured’s option up to $250,000 and $500,000 (§ 3420(f)(2)(A)). Minimum liability limits are $25,000 and $50,000 for injury and death of one person, $50,000 and $100,000 for two or more, and $10,000 for property (Vehicle and Traffic Law § 311(4)(a)).