Gair, Gair, Conason, Rubinowitz, Bloom, Hershenhorn, Steigman & Mackauf is a New York Plaintiff's personal injury law firm specializing in automobile accidents, construction accidents, medical malpractice, products liability, police misconduct and all types of New York personal injury litigation.
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lawdragon-black-3The law firm of  Gair, Gair, Conason, Rubinowitz, Blooom, Hershenhorn, Steigman & Mackauf is proud to announce that 8 of our personal injury attorneys have been listed in the 2023 Lawdragon 500 Leading Plaintiff Consumer Lawyers including one in the Lawdragon Hall of Fame.

Congratulations to Marijo Adimey, Jeffrey Bloom, Diana Carnemolla, Christopher Donadio, Howard Hershenhorn, Ben Rubinowitz and Peter Saghir for being included in this list and to Anthony Gair for not only being included in this list but also to to be an esteemed member of the Lawdragon Hall of Fame.

For more than 30 years Lawdragon has been researching and reporting on the legal profession. Their teams are made of independent journalists researching submissions and establishing lists of lawyers who have significantly impacted their area of law and regularly won consequent verdicts and settlements.

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After a dip in 2020, construction accident deaths in New York State and New York City were on the rise again in 2021 according to the recently released “Deadly Skyline” report.  “Deadly Skyline” is an annual report released by the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH). NYCOSH uses the most recent available data from the United States Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (DOL BLS) to compile an annual report on construction accident deaths in New York City and New York State.

A total of 61 hard hats died in NY State in 2021 compared to respectively 71, 69, 58, 55 and 41 in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. Since 2016, during which a record number of construction workers died in NYS, the number of fatalities gradually declined to reach its lowest since 2013. While the slowdown in construction activity due to the Covid19 lockdown was a factor in the 2020 dip, the number of fatalities reported in 2021 jumped above the number of fatalities reported in 2019 and 2018.

fatalities in construction NY State 2021
Among the 61 construction workers who died in NY State,  20 of them died while working on a construction site in NYC. Construction workers fatalities also increased in 2021 in NYC compared to 2020 but remain lower or equal to the number of fatalities reported annually between 2013 and 2019 in the city. With the exception of 2020, construction fatalities in NYC never went below 20 since 2012 ands the only time they went down to 20 was in 2017.

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Personal Injury Trial Technics by Attorney Ben RubinowitzOur managing partner, Ben Rubinowitz, was recently a guest on Unscripted Direct, a popular podcast among the law school trial advocacy community presented by Spencer Pahlke and Justin Bernstein. In “Episode 48 – Bad Facts” Ben demonstrates how to cross examine witnesses by using voice of reason questions to which the witness has no choice but to answer in the favor of the plaintiff.  This approach to cross examination helps to both destroy the witness’ credibility and at the same time create powerful and winning arguments on summation.

In the podcast Ben demonstrated how this approach can be used in almost any negligence case by using multiple examples. Ben calls this “walking the witness down to a tight rope so when you finally push, the witness falls in the canyon of doom and there is no escape”.

Listen to several interactive examples of “voice of reason questions” in episode 48 of Unscripted Direct  (Ben segment starts at 00:17:50)

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2022 NYC car accident fatalities by categoryLast year traffic fatalities in New York City reached their second highest level since Vision Zero started in 2014.  Last year was also the first year in office for the Adams Administration and the new DOT Commissioner, Ydanis Rodriguez.

Yesterday in an oversight hearing with the City Council, Rodriguez admitted that his department has been unable to reach specific street safety benchmarks required by the Council’s landmark 2019 Streets Plan. Last year the DOT only upgraded 14 bus stops out of the 500 planned and installed 4.4 miles of the 20 miles of protected bus lanes as well as 26.3 miles of the 30 protected bike lanes required.

The bills proposed by the City Council are not going far enough according to street activists

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Lithium ion battery can be dangerousA 67 year old woman was critically injured in a fire sparked by a defective lithium-ion battery in Brooklyn, NYC yesterday early morning.

The victim was residing in a building located on Goodwin Place  in Bushwick and was probably asleep when the fire erupted around 1:40 am on Tuesday morning.  The fire started in an apartment that one of the tenants had transformed into a lithium battery repair shop. 50 lithium batteries were found there by the firefighters. It is not clear how many batteries exploded but the FDNY said that the fire sparked so fast and was so intense that the fire alarms and the sprinkler system which were working, were of no help.   When firefighters arrived, all 3 floors of the building were ravaged by the blaze. They were still able to find the victim but she was already in bad condition. Another victim suffered minor injuries. The tenant who was running the off-the-book repair shop was not home at the time of the explosion but had left several batteries to charge overnight.

The FDNY told the NY daily News that since the beginning of this year, they have been responding to an average of 3 fires caused by lithium batteries every week.

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map of crash fatalitiesAn estimated 42,915 people died in crashes in the US in 2021.Traffic accident fatalities which had been on a declining trend for 30 years started to increase since 2020. Last year, the US DOT announced that it would apply the Vision Zero concept nationally to tackle this problem.

New Yorkers are familiar with Vision Zero which started in 2014. The program was successful at the beginning but got out of hand since the Covid19 crisis.  The program was  good at identifying dangerous corridors and areas that needed improvements but the implementations of safety measures in dangerous areas, especially those  located in historically disadvantaged communities remained too often unrealized. As a result, most road fatalities in New York City  still occur in dangerous areas that had been identified as such almost 10 years ago.  Just like in 2014 in New York City, the US DOT did some outstanding in-depth research and developed amazing interactive maps to point out dangerous areas in each community of the entire country.

The work of the DOT is extremely impressive:

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OSHA picture of the fatal construction accidentThe negligence of a contractor caused the death of a construction worker in Poughkeepsie in 2017. Maximiliano Saban died and another of his colleague suffered personal injury after a wall collapsed on them.

The wall collapsed because the contractor, Finbar O-Neil who owns OneKey LLC, did not follow OSHA safety rules. O-Neil had to implement a soil compacting plan involving piling large quantities of dirt called surcharges on top of the construction sites of 3 buildings. An engineering company prepared the plan on how to use the  surcharges. However to gain time, O-Neil decided that, instead of following the plan, he would build a wall that would retain one of the surcharges so that workers could start to work on the building next to it. He made the decision on his own without consulting with engineers to know if the wall would sustain the surcharges.

On the day of the accident, some construction workers complained that construction machines were on the top of the surcharges adding dirt to it. Later on during the day, Maximiliano and a colleague were working next to the wall when it collapsed. They both ran away but Maximiliano was unable to escape.

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Health-Technoogy-Hazards-scaledWhile health technology is often synonymous with progress, some medical devices can be dangerous and lead to patient injury and death. Every, year the ECRI Institute compiles a list of the 10 most hazardous technologies in healthcare. This year the Top 10 health hazards are:

1. Confusing recalls of at-home medical devices

This health hazard arises from Philips’ chaotic recall of defective respirators that cost the lives of hundreds of  at home patients suffering from sleep apnea.  Between April 2021 and October 2022, the FDA received 260 reports of  patients who died while using the Philips respirator. The device was recalled but the manufacturer contacted mostly healthcare providers which were supposed to pass the information to their patients. The process was chaotic and many patients were never proprely informed. As a result, they continued to use the defective device and died. Some patients were contacted directly by the manufacturer, but the notification was unclear. The language was technological jargon that patients did not understand proprely.

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Emotional-trauma-not-compensated-in-NY-wrongful-deathThe Grieving Families Act, a wrongful death bill that would allow courts to consider emotional damages when calculating financial compensation in a wrongful death lawsuit was vetoed by NY Governor Kathie Hochul. The bill also extended the statute of limitation and extended the definition of family to not only the parents but to other loved ones close to the person who died such as siblings, grandparents or domestic partners.

Our partner, NY wrongful death attorney Jeffrey Bloom, who was instrumental in helping the bill pass the Assembly and the Senate spoke to CBS News in the video below.

New York wrongful death law has not been updated since 1847 and the bill that was passed last June with a large bipartisan majority by both chambers in Albany would have modernized the actual pre-civil war wrongful death statute

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More pedestrians and more passengers died in auto accidents in 2022 than in 2021 while cyclists and motor vehicle operators fatalities declined. Bus accidents increased while truck accidents remained stable. Motorcycle accidents remain at record levels.

After reaching a record high in 2021, NYC traffic deaths reached their second highest number since Vision Zero started in 2014

According to traffic collision data provided by the NYPD, 251 people died in crashes in the city in 2022 compared to respectively 254, 239, 214, 199, 209, 223, 235, 250 and 286 in 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014 and 2013. As a reminder, NYPD traffic collision data might differ slightly from the real data, especially for fatalities as sometimes people died from their injuries several days or weeks after the accident occurred.

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