Section 5102 of the New York State Insurance Law sets forth what is commonly referred to as the “no fault threshold.” It states, in short, that if a plaintiff has suffered a “serious injury,” as defined by the statute, he or she is not barred from recovering damages in a personal injury lawsuit. It, in turn, proceeds to list the various types of injuries that qualify as “serious.” N.Y. Ins. Law §5102(a). In crafting the statute, the Legislature did not require plaintiffs to meet any special evidentiary burdens to show that they had suffered serious injuries. It simply provided that, if the plaintiff suffered an injury that met the language of the statute, he or she could recover damages.

However, in recent years, the judiciary has, through case law, created a Byzantine array of technical and evidentiary hurdles that plaintiffs must surmount to show that their injuries are “serious.” The legal landscape that has been created incentivizes defendants to make summary judgment motions on threshold grounds. Even a knowledgeable plaintiff’s attorney may fail to successfully navigate this judicially created hall of mirrors. As a result, the courts have been flooded with threshold motions, and many plaintiffs with significant, disabling soft tissue injuries and treating physicians willing to support their claims have seen their cases dismissed.

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