If you were attacked in a building, a garage, a hotel, or a business, a NYC negligent security lawyer can tell you whether the property owner shares responsibility for what happened to you. These are premises liability claims, and they are not about blaming a victim for being somewhere. They are about a building that had a broken lock, a dark garage, or a history of the same thing happening and did nothing.
Korman Lynch Lustig & Sassower handles these cases with discretion and moves quickly, because the records that prove what a property knew are gathered rather than volunteered. Below are the questions injured people and their families ask our negligent security attorneys most.
Call us at (212) 732-4992 24/7 to arrange to speak with a personal injury lawyer about your case, or contact us through our website today.
New York property owners are required to take reasonable, minimal precautions to protect the people lawfully on their property from criminal acts they could foresee. When an owner knows an area is dangerous and leaves the front door lock broken, the lobby camera dead, and the garage unlit, and someone is assaulted as a result, the law treats that failure as a cause of the harm.
The person who committed the crime is responsible for their own conduct. That does not excuse a property owner who made the crime easy.
You may have a case if you were attacked on property that had inadequate security, and if reasonable measures would likely have prevented what happened. That includes tenants, guests, customers, hotel guests, employees, and delivery workers.
Two things people assume wrongly. You do not need the attacker to have been caught or convicted, and you do not need to have complained about the security yourself. Our negligent security lawyers review the facts at no cost and with complete confidentiality.
An owner is not responsible for a random act nobody could have anticipated. Responsibility follows from what the property knew or should have known, and that is usually established with a history: prior assaults, robberies, or break-ins in the same building or the immediate area, tenant complaints about broken doors and strangers in the stairwells, police activity at the address, and the owner's own incident reports.
Foreseeability does not require that the same crime happened before. A building with a pattern of intruders getting inside cannot argue that an assault by an intruder was unimaginable.
The second question is whether the missing measure would have mattered. A locked front door that had been broken for weeks, a working camera at the entrance, adequate lighting, or a guard who was supposed to be at a post are all measures that can be tied directly to how the attacker got in and what happened next.
This is where these cases are won or lost, and it is why the physical details matter so much: which door, what lock, how long it had been broken, and how the person got inside.
An owner who chooses to provide security also has to provide it competently. A camera system that was never connected, or a guard service reduced to save money after a series of incidents, can be worse than none at all in the eyes of a jury.
Apartment buildings and public housing, parking garages and lots, hotels and motels, bars and nightclubs, stores and shopping centers, office buildings, hospitals and clinics, schools and campuses, gyms, and the entrances and common areas of mixed use buildings.
Those cases carry an additional route. Beyond the security questions, New York allows a claim against an establishment that served alcohol to a visibly intoxicated person who then injures someone. That claim exists alongside the negligent security claim about crowd control, bouncers, capacity, and how a known conflict was handled.
Bar and club cases turn on details that disappear quickly: the service records, the video, the bouncers on duty that night, the incident log, and whether the venue called for help or removed people into the street where the fight continued.
The claim can still proceed. A negligent security case is brought against the property owner and the companies responsible for the premises, not against the person who committed the crime. Most of these cases involve an unidentified attacker, and the case is proven with the building's records rather than with the assailant's testimony.
This is an honest complication worth knowing about. In New York, a building security case generally depends on showing that the attacker was an intruder who got in because the entrance was not secured. Where the person had a right to be there, the claim is harder, though not automatically over, because an owner can still be responsible where it knew about a specific danger and failed to act on it.
Proving that someone was an intruder is usually done circumstantially, through the condition of the doors, the way the person entered and left, video, and testimony from residents. It is one of the first questions our negligent security lawyers work on.
The same duties apply, on a much shorter clock. A claim against the Housing Authority or another public agency generally requires a formal notice of claim within about ninety days, with a shortened time to sue after that, as explained on our municipal liability page.
Broken lobby doors, dark stairwells, and long unrepaired locks are among the most common conditions in these cases, and the repair and complaint history is usually well documented.
With the property's own records and the neighborhood's crime history. Our negligent security lawyers pursue prior incident reports for the building and the area, police records showing calls and complaints at the address, 311 and tenant complaints, work orders and repair histories for doors, locks, intercoms, lighting, and cameras, security company contracts and the written post orders that say what guards were supposed to do, guard logs and timekeeping records, camera coverage maps and retention policies, leases and management agreements, and the video itself.
Video is the first priority and the first thing lost. Building systems commonly overwrite within days, so a preservation demand goes out immediately.
These cases are handled privately and at your pace, and you decide how much to say and when. A civil claim against the property does not depend on a criminal case, and courts frequently permit survivors to proceed using initials or a pseudonym rather than a full name.
Where the survivor was a child at the time, New York allows far more time than an ordinary claim, generally until age 55, under the Child Victims Act. Asking a question does not commit you to anything.
Generally three years from the date of the assault against a private property owner, and two years in a death case. Where a public agency such as the Housing Authority is responsible, a written notice of claim is generally due within about ninety days. Claims involving childhood sexual abuse run on their own much longer rule.
The practical clock is far shorter, because video is the evidence these cases live on and it is gone within weeks.
No. Our negligent security lawyers handle these cases on a contingency fee basis, which means there is no fee unless there is a recovery. The first consultation is free, confidential, and carries no obligation.
Korman Lynch Lustig & Sassower carries the case so you can concentrate on recovering. Our negligent security lawyers:
These cases are prepared as if a jury will hear them, because that is what makes an owner and its insurer take the failure seriously. A settlement on the right number is welcome. A settlement that treats what happened to you as a small matter is not one this firm accepts because it comes early.
If you were attacked somewhere that should have been secure, the footage and the repair records that show what the property knew are easiest to reach right now. The conversation is free and confidential, and Korman Lynch Lustig & Sassower does not get paid unless you do.
Call us at (212) 732-4992 24/7 to arrange to speak with a personal injury lawyer about your case, or contact us through our website today.
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