Recently, in Ciaravino v. City of New York (a trip-and-fall case), the Appellate Division, First Department reversed summary judgment for defendant and granted plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment.
Plaintiff alleged that she was injured when she tripped and fell after she stepped into a depression in the street near a subway exit in Union Square Park. In her Notice of Claim – which must be filed in certain cases, such as this one, against the City – plaintiff mistakenly said that the subway exit was on Union Square East, rather than on Union Square West.
She corrected this at her statutory hearing (conducted pursuant to General Municipal Law § 50-h) by stating that the “accident occurred in the location shown in a photograph of a Union Square subway exit with no canopy, amid a farmer’s market, by a 16th Street sign” and “submitted information obtained from the Internet showing that the other two subway exits in Union Square Park are covered by canopies and are located well south of 16th Street.”
The court held that “[u]nder these circumstances, plaintiff should have been allowed to correct the notice of claim pursuant to General Municipal Law § 50-e(6), since the mistake was not made in bad faith and defendant was not prejudiced by the defective notice.” It was also noteworthy that defendant failed to send anyone to “investigate the scene of the accident either before or after the correct location had become apparent” and unsuccessfully argued that “even if the error were corrected, plaintiff failed to identify the location of the accident with sufficient specificity.”
While this case illustrates that there are corrective mechanisms to address errors such as the location of an accident, care should still be taken – if only to avoid unnecessary motion practice – to avoid errors in the Notice of Claim. But, nobody’s perfect, and mistakes happen. Fortunately for plaintiff here, that mistake was not fatal to her claim.