This office handles two kinds of cases: workers’ compensation, and injuries caused by someone else’s carelessness. They are separate systems with separate rules, separate deadlines, and separate places where they are decided. A great many people who walk in here have both at once and do not know it.
That overlap is the reason this page exists. A worker who falls off a scaffold has a compensation claim against his employer’s carrier and, usually, a lawsuit against the building’s owner and the general contractor. Someone hurt in a car accident on a work errand has both a no-fault claim and a compensation claim, and possibly a lawsuit on top of that. Handled together, those cases support each other. Handled separately by people who do not talk to each other, one can quietly damage the other.
The Law Offices of Frank J. Dito, Jr. serves Staten Island and Brooklyn. Below is what we do, and where to read more about each.
Workers’ compensation
If you were hurt on the job in New York, you have a right to benefits without having to prove anyone was at fault. That is the whole bargain of the compensation system: you give up the right to sue your employer, and in exchange you get medical treatment and wage replacement regardless of who caused the accident. Even a worker whose own mistake caused the injury is covered.
Other personal injury attorneys in New York refer their clients’ compensation claims to this office. That is worth saying plainly, because compensation practice is its own world — its own courtrooms, its own judges, its own forms, its own medical rules — and a lot of lawyers who handle accident cases do not practice in it.
The workers’ compensation page covers what benefits actually pay, how the weekly check is calculated, the deadlines that decide whether you have a claim at all, and when you can bring a lawsuit alongside the claim.
Personal injury
Where someone else’s carelessness caused the injury, the claim is a lawsuit rather than an administrative benefit, and proving fault is the work. These cases turn on evidence that is easiest to collect early: the police report, the photographs, the maintenance records, the names of the people who saw it.
Several of these claims turn on a particular statute, and each has its own page:
- Car accidents — why these crashes happen, what affects the strength of a claim, and the damages available to an injured driver or passenger.
- The serious injury threshold — the bar a car accident claim has to clear before you can sue for pain and suffering, and what New York changed in 2026.
- Sidewalk, snow and ice falls — who is responsible for the sidewalk in front of a New York City building, the City’s prior written notice rule, and how snow and ice cases are treated differently.
- Labor Law § 240 and § 241 — falls from heights and falling objects on a job site, and when the owner and general contractor answer for them no matter who signed your paycheck.
- Wrongful death — who is allowed to bring the case, what a family is permitted to recover under New York law, and how it fits with compensation death benefits.
When one accident is both kinds of case
Section 11 of the Workers’ Compensation Law makes the compensation benefit the only remedy against your employer. Section 29 of the same statute says you do not have to choose between that benefit and a lawsuit against anybody else. Both things are true at the same time, and the second one gets overlooked constantly.
So the question after a work injury is rarely whether to file a claim or bring a suit. It is who, other than the employer, was responsible — the property owner, the general contractor, another subcontractor, a driver, the maker of a defective machine — and then how to run the two cases together.
Running them together matters because they are connected in ways that can hurt you. The compensation carrier gets a lien on whatever the lawsuit recovers. It has to be asked for written consent before that lawsuit settles, or a court order obtained in its place, and a settlement signed without one can end your future benefits. These are not exotic problems. They are ordinary features of a work injury case, and they are the reason it helps to have the same office watching both.
Medical care that caused harm
Two related areas, handled separately because they involve different defendants.
Medical malpractice covers mistakes by doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other professionals — a diagnosis that came too late, a surgical error, the wrong medication. Hospital negligence covers the institution itself: understaffing, inadequate training, failures of the systems a hospital is supposed to have in place.
Both require expert medical proof that the care fell below the accepted standard and that the failure caused the harm, which is what separates a bad outcome from a case.
Nursing home neglect and abuse
Families put a parent in a facility because they cannot provide the care themselves, and then have to work out whether what they are seeing is ordinary decline or something that should not be happening. Pressure sores, unexplained falls, dehydration, sudden withdrawal, injuries nobody can account for.
Neglect and abuse are different things legally, and the nursing home page explains the difference and what the warning signs look like.
When someone has died
There are two claims here and they are not alternatives.
Workers’ compensation death benefits are payable to the family of a worker killed on the job or by an occupational illness. Weekly payments to a surviving spouse and children, plus funeral and burial expenses, with no need to prove anyone was negligent.
A wrongful death lawsuit is brought against whoever caused the death. It has to be filed by the personal representative of the estate rather than by the family directly, it runs two years from the date of death, and New York limits what it can recover in ways that surprise most families. Where a death happened at work, both are usually available.
The 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund
Staten Island sent a great many people downtown after September 11th, and a great many more worked the Fresh Kills site in the months that followed. Illnesses connected to that exposure are still being diagnosed now, twenty-five years on.
The Victims Compensation Fund page covers who qualifies and how to apply. If the exposure happened in the course of your job, there may also be a New York workers’ compensation claim — see Fresh Kills and 9/11 responder claims.
Talk to us
Most of these cases have a deadline running from the day of the accident or the day of the death, and some of them have more than one running at different speeds. If you are not sure which apply to you, that is worth a phone call early rather than late.
Call 718.701.2776 (toll-free: 800.310.5520) or contact us. Consultations are free. If we don’t recover money for you, we don’t get paid.
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