New York City Birth Injury Lawyer

A birth injury changes everything before a family even has time to process what happened. Parents who arrived at a hospital expecting a healthy delivery suddenly face a diagnosis, a treatment plan, and a future they had not prepared for. At Cohan Law Firm, we work with families across New York City who are confronting exactly that situation and trying to understand whether what happened to their child could have been prevented. If it could have been, the medical providers responsible should be held accountable. That is what a New York City birth injury lawyer does, and it is work our firm takes seriously.

What Separates a Birth Injury from a Birth Defect

This distinction matters enormously, both medically and legally. A birth defect develops before labor, typically due to genetic factors, infections during pregnancy, or other causes that may not be tied to any medical error. A birth injury, by contrast, occurs during labor, delivery, or in the immediate newborn period, and is often the result of something that went wrong in the way care was delivered.

Brachial plexus injuries, for example, frequently result from excessive force during delivery. Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, a form of brain injury caused by oxygen deprivation, often traces back to delayed emergency intervention when fetal distress signals were present. Cerebral palsy, while it can have multiple causes, is sometimes linked to birth complications that medical staff failed to manage properly. These are not inevitabilities. They are outcomes that proper monitoring, timely decision-making, and skilled delivery technique can often prevent.

Families are sometimes told by hospitals that what happened was simply unavoidable, a complication of a difficult birth. That may be true. But it may also not be. Understanding which is which requires a careful review of the medical records, the fetal monitoring strips, the timing of interventions, and the standards of care that governed each decision made in that delivery room.

How Liability Actually Works in These Cases

Birth injury cases sit within medical malpractice law, which in New York has its own procedural requirements and standards. To establish liability, the case must show that a medical provider, an obstetrician, a nurse-midwife, a neonatologist, a hospital, owed a duty of care to the mother and child, that they deviated from the accepted standard of care, and that the deviation caused the injury.

The standard of care is the key battleground in almost every birth injury case. Medicine is not perfect, and not every poor outcome is malpractice. What the law asks is whether a reasonably competent provider in the same specialty, under the same circumstances, would have acted differently. That question gets answered through medical expert testimony, and in New York, a malpractice case cannot proceed without it.

Our firm works with qualified medical experts who review what happened and give an honest assessment of whether the care fell below an acceptable standard. If it did, we build a case around that finding. If the evidence does not support a claim, we tell families that directly. We are not in the business of filing cases that should not be filed, and we are not going to give a family false hope about what the evidence shows.

Liability can extend beyond the individual physician. Hospitals can be responsible for the negligent acts of staff members employed by them. Staffing decisions, equipment failures, and inadequate supervision of residents or trainees can all implicate the institution itself. In New York City, where deliveries happen across major academic medical centers, community hospitals, and everything in between, the structure of who employed whom and how care was organized matters to where the legal responsibility falls.

The Damages in Birth Injury Claims and Why They Look Different from Other Cases

The financial scope of a serious birth injury claim is often substantial, not because attorneys inflate numbers, but because the actual lifetime costs of caring for a child with a significant injury are substantial. A child diagnosed with cerebral palsy, for example, may require ongoing physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, adaptive equipment, specialized schooling, residential care as an adult, and medical monitoring across an entire lifetime. When you project those costs forward over seventy or eighty years, the numbers become large.

Damages in New York birth injury cases typically include past and future medical expenses, the cost of long-term care and rehabilitation, lost earning capacity for the child, and compensation for pain and suffering. Parents may also have claims for their own losses, including lost income from time spent caregiving and their own emotional harm.

New York does not cap damages in medical malpractice cases, which is meaningful in cases involving catastrophic injuries. It also means that the fight over the right number is often intense. Defense experts will challenge life care plans, dispute causation, and argue that projected costs are speculative. Having attorneys who have handled the full scope of these disputes, who understand how to present medical and economic evidence in a way that holds up, is not a formality. It is the difference in how these cases resolve.

The Timeline Families Should Understand Before Deciding What to Do

New York’s statute of limitations for medical malpractice is two and a half years from the date of the act or omission that caused the injury, with some exceptions. In birth injury cases, there are additional rules that can extend the time available when the injured party is a minor. Under New York law, the statute of limitations for a child’s claim generally does not begin to run until the child turns eighteen, meaning some claims can be brought well into adulthood. However, the rules are technical, there are exceptions and complications, and waiting too long creates real problems: witnesses’ memories fade, records become harder to obtain, and expert review takes time.

Starting the process of having a case evaluated does not commit a family to anything. It simply allows attorneys to review what happened while the information is fresh and complete. If a claim exists, beginning that process earlier gives the legal team more to work with. Cohan Law Firm offers free consultations and handles birth injury cases on a contingency basis, meaning no fees unless there is a recovery.

Questions Families Ask Us About Birth Injury Claims

How do we know whether what happened was malpractice or just a bad outcome?

That is genuinely one of the hardest questions in this area of law, and the honest answer is that you often cannot know without a review of the medical records by a qualified expert. Our firm conducts that review before making any claim, and we give families a straightforward assessment of what the records show.

How long does a birth injury case typically take in New York?

These cases move slowly. Medical malpractice cases in New York City often take several years from filing to resolution, whether through settlement or trial. The timeline depends on court scheduling, the complexity of the medical issues, and whether the case resolves before or after trial. We keep clients informed throughout so there are no surprises.

Will we have to go to court?

Most civil cases resolve before trial, including malpractice cases. However, in birth injury matters involving significant damages, defendants and their insurers sometimes decline to settle at a reasonable amount, and trial becomes necessary. Our attorneys prepare every case as if it will go to trial, which also tends to produce better settlement results.

Can we bring a claim if our child’s injury was not diagnosed until years after birth?

This comes up often with conditions like cerebral palsy that may not be fully apparent at birth. The statute of limitations analysis in those situations is more complicated and depends on when the malpractice occurred, not necessarily when the diagnosis was made. These cases require careful legal analysis of the timing, and families should not assume a claim is too old without speaking to an attorney.

What if the hospital told us the injury was not their fault?

Hospitals are represented by legal counsel from the moment an adverse event occurs. What hospital staff or administrators say to families in the aftermath should not be treated as a neutral account of what happened. An independent legal and medical review is the only way to get an honest picture.

Do we need to pay anything upfront to hire Cohan Law Firm?

No. Our birth injury cases are handled on a contingency basis. There is no fee unless we recover compensation for your family.

Does it matter which hospital or borough the delivery took place in?

The venue for a lawsuit can be influenced by where the care was provided, but our firm handles cases across all five boroughs, including Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and beyond. The location of the delivery does not affect a family’s ability to work with us.

Cohan Law Firm Represents New York City Birth Injury Families

The families we represent in birth injury cases are dealing with something that few people outside of that situation can fully understand. The legal process is one piece of a much larger picture, and we work to make our part of it as clear and manageable as possible. Cohan Law Firm has recovered over $100 million for accident and injury victims across New York City, and we bring that same focus to families whose children have been harmed by preventable medical errors. If you want an honest conversation about what may have happened and whether a claim makes sense, contact our New York City birth injury attorneys for a free and confidential consultation. Hablamos Español.