Last December we discussed the Court of Appeals’ opinion in Landon v. Kroll Laboratory Specialists, 22 N.Y.3d 1 (2013), which held that a duty of reasonable care is owed by laboratories that perform drug testing to the subjects of the testing.1 The Appellate Division, Second Department, was recently confronted with an appeal requiring it to assess the scope of that duty, and that court was divided in answering the question. The two opinions spawned by that appeal are the focus of this month’s column.
Revisiting Duty
In Landon, the Court of Appeals affirmed the Second Department’s holding that a laboratory that tested body fluid samples for controlled substances could be held liable to the subject of the testing for negligence in the manner in which it performed that function. The plaintiff in that case, who was on probation for forgery, had his probationary period extended and was subjected to probation revocation proceedings based upon a report by the defendant laboratory that he had tested positive for marijuana. He sued the laboratory for negligence, alleging that it reported a false positive result because it used a screen test cutoff level substantially lower than both federal standards and the test manufacturer’s recommendations, and that the defendant failed to disclose those differences.
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