Personal Injury Attorneys - Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island and the Bronx

One of my favorite court decisions of 2009 was the Appellate Division, Second Department decision in Vinluan v. Doyle, 60 A.D.3d 237, 873 N.Y.S.2d 72. This is so because of the eloquent and impassioned defense of the constitutional right of an attorney to give, and a client to receive, advice of counsel. The case involved the simultaneous resignation of ten nurses from positions at a Smithtown, Long Island nursing home, Avalon Gardens Rehabilitation and Health Care Center, over pay and other working conditions, including being required to work as clerks for about $12 per hour and being housed in a single-family staff house with only one bathroom, inadequate heat, and no telephone service. The nurses were indicted for the misdemeanor offenses of conspiracy in the sixth degree, endangering the welfare of a child, and endangering the welfare of a physically-disabled pe

It may be hard to find a more eloquent and impassioned defense of the constitutional right of an attorney to give, and a client to receive, advice of counsel than in the decision in Vinluan v. Doyle, 60 A.D.3d 237, 873 N.Y.S.2d 72 (Appellate Division, 2nd Department, January 13, 2009). The matter granted a petition for Article 78 review brought on by a group of ten nurses and their attorney to prohibit the Suffolk County district attorney from prosecuting, and Supreme Court justice from presiding over, a criminal case against the nurses, who were indicted for the misdemeanor offenses of conspiracy in the sixth degree, endangering the welfare of a child, and endangering the welfare of a physically-disabled person. The prosecution came in the aftermath of their simultaneous resignations from positions at a Long Island nursing home. The attorney who provided these nurses with legal advice was also indicted for allegedly advising

A construction worker who was pouring concrete at Trump SoHo, a condominium hotel in SoHo, fell 42 floors to his death on the afternoon of January 14, 2008, when a wooden mold used to set the concrete collapsed. Another worker was thrown from the 42nd floor, but was caught in a safety net that extends outward from the 40th floor, fire officials said. He was brought to safety in a construction bucket and hospitalized for injuries that the authorities said were not life threatening. Two other workers were treated for minor injuries. The cause of the collapse was unclear. Officials said their initial analysis indicated that the project's crane was not involved in the accident, but several people who said they witnessed the accident from the street described the crane as swaying dangerously and crashing into the side of the upper two floors. Trump SoHo is a sleek gray tower that is to rise 45 stories at the northwest corner of Spring Street and Varick Street, near Avenue of

Courts contnue to find it important that schools fulfill their non-delegable duty ofprotecting their students. Recently, the Appellate Division, Third Department, in Matter of Binghamton City School District v. Peacock, Docket No. 502329, held that public policy supports a no-leniency standard for teachers that instill harmon their students. The court clearly delivered this message when it held that a two-year suspensionfor a teacher who engaged in a "grossly inappropriate" relationship with a sixteen year old student was too lenient. The case centers on a teacher where there is evidence that he helped the student purchase a cell phone and spoke to her over 1300 times on the phone, and there is also an issue as to whether therelationship turned sexual.The teacher was warned at least three times by the school to desist his inappropria

The scaffoldingthat broke last Friday (12/7/07), causing a pair of brother window washers to plunge 47 stories (550 feet) on Manhattan's upper East Side, had been cited for 10 violations in June, including four that were repeat violations, state records show. Inspection records from the New York State Labor Department show that the scaffolding had been inspected twice in the past two years - and 10 violations were issued, but they were not severe enough to warrant a stop-work order. Why one brother died and the other survived is a mystery. Speculation is that while they tried to ride their platform to the ground, as one window washer said he had been trained to do in such an accident, one of the brothers, Edgar Moreno, may have been thrown off of the platform before it hit the ground. His brother, Alcides Moreno, though seriously injured, was conscious and sitting up soon after firefighters arrived. Alcides Moreno's injuries include collapsed lungs, damaged kidn

It has become commonplace for attorneys and others sending faxes and e-mails to include at the end of such communications standard language stating that the contents thereof are confidential and priviledged. Such standard language should provide no comfort, however, for senders and receivers of e-mails that use an employer's server. A decision by Hon. Charles E. Ramos of the Supreme Court, New York County, holds that a pro forma notice at the end of an e-mail message did not inure the attorney-client priviledge to the e-mail when an employer's e-mail server is used. The Court was particularly persuaded by the fact that the employer had promulgated a Human Resources Policy and Procedure Manual that included policies requiring that its electronic mail system (as well as the Internet and other technology systems)be used for business purposes only, that employees using the e-mail system had no personal privacy right in any material using the e-mail system, and that the

An interesting discussion contrasting the technology, data storage characteristics and the discovery process of e-mails with instant messages (IM) appears in an article by attorneys Michael B. de Leeuw and Eric A. Hirsch in the "E-Discovery" special section of the November 5, 2007 New York Law Journal. IM is quickly becoming the medium of choice for informal communication in the workplace, offering far greater efficiency, speed and immediacy than e-mail. The article points out that although IM typically are stored locally in individual hard drives rather than in servers, some users of IM have found themselves in trouble because they did not realize that sometimes a log tracking their messages may be in use. As seen in <u>Scott v, Beth Israel Medical Center Inc.</u>, discussed above, employees may want to be particularly wary when using company-sponsored instant messaging program, as opposed to IM programs from America Online, MSN, Yahoo and the like. The l