I represented a New York City Department of Sanitation mechanic who was injured at work, while walking from a mechanic’s tunnel to the yard where the sanitation trucks were kept. He was carrying a container with hydraulic oil in it.

The area where he had to walk from the tunnel to the yard had a change in grade and in order to keep trucks from bottoming out, sanitation department employees had installed a steel plate to level out the surface. That steel plate was wet and oily, and on the day of my client’s injury it was raining. There was oil and water on the plate, and as my client stepped on the plate, he slipped; his feet went up in the air, he landed on his lower back, and afterwards was out of work indefinitely. He ended up having a discectomy and lower back fusion with instrumentation that was installed.

I represented a woman who was visiting a friend living at a residence at a local country club. As my client made her way to the friend’s apartment at the property, she slipped and fell on ice that was not properly taken care of, resulting in a fractured femur.

She had surgery and had to have a rod put in her leg to repair it. She was an older woman, so her bones were somewhat brittle and therefore hard to repair without installing a rod. That meant surgery and rehab , which were both completed successfully. After coming out of rehab, she went back to living alone in an apartment.

Once back in her apartment, she felt the need to mop her kitchen floor, and in doing so, she slipped and re-fractured the same femur, starting the same slow process of healing all over again; another surgery, another stint in rehab.