If you were hurt on an escalator in Buffalo, you have options. Escalator accidents fall under premises liability law, and when a property owner, building manager, or maintenance company fails to keep a machine in safe condition, they can be held responsible for the injuries that result. Our escalator accident attorneys represent people across Western New York who were hurt in exactly these situations, and the cases are more winnable than most people expect.
One deadline you need to know about right now: if the escalator was in an NFTA Metro Rail station, a government building, a public school, or any other publicly operated facility, New York law requires you to file a formal Notice of Claim within 90 days of the accident. That is not the lawsuit filing deadline. It is a preliminary notice requirement that comes first. Miss it and you may lose the right to sue a government entity entirely, regardless of how serious your injuries are. For accidents on private property, the general statute of limitations in New York is three years from the date of injury.
If you are not sure who owns the property or whether a government entity is involved, that is exactly the kind of question our escalator injury lawyers sort out at the outset. Do not try to figure it out alone.
Yes. Property owners, building managers, and maintenance companies in New York carry a legal duty to keep escalators in safe working order. When they fail that duty and someone is hurt, premises liability law allows the injured person to pursue compensation through a personal injury claim.
To succeed, you generally need to show that the responsible party knew about a hazardous condition or should have known about it and failed to fix it or warn the public. That standard applies whether the escalator is in a retail store on Transit Road, a medical office building near the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, the Galleria Mall in Cheektowaga, or an underground NFTA station on the Metro Rail line. The duty is the same everywhere.
Escalators in New York are subject to periodic inspection requirements. If inspections were skipped, or if maintenance logs document complaints that went unanswered, that evidence goes directly to liability. Our personal injury attorneys know where to look for it.
Call us 24/7 at 716-854-1300 to speak with a personal injury lawyer near you, or contact us for a FREE consultation.
It matters procedurally, and the consequences of missing the government-entity deadline are permanent.
If your injury happened at an NFTA Metro Rail station, a county facility, a public hospital, or anywhere else operated by a government body, New York General Municipal Law requires you to file a Notice of Claim within 90 days of the accident. Courts enforce this strictly. Miss that window and your ability to sue the government entity is almost certainly gone, no matter how strong the underlying case is.
NFTA operates escalators at several of its underground stations along the Main Street line, including the Delavan/Canisius College station, which has some of the deepest platform access on the system. These are high-traffic machines in aging infrastructure. When they fail, people get hurt. But the 90-day clock starts the day you are injured.
If a government entity may have been involved, call our escalator accident lawyers today. That deadline moves fast.
You can still recover. New York follows a comparative fault rule. The court assigns a percentage of fault to each party, and your compensation is reduced by your share. Twenty percent at fault means you recover eighty percent of your damages. You are not barred from recovery unless your share reaches one hundred percent.
Property owners and their insurers will argue fault onto you whenever possible. You were looking at your phone. You were not holding the handrail. Your shoes were wrong. These defenses come out in nearly every escalator personal injury case. Our injury lawyers know how those arguments are built, and we know how to push back.
The fact that you were not paying perfect attention does not excuse a machine that stopped without warning or a step that had been cracked for weeks.
Most escalator injuries come down to deferred maintenance. Someone was responsible for keeping the machine safe and did not. The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that escalator accidents injure thousands of people in the United States every year. In most cases, that harm was preventable.
The causes our escalator accident attorneys see most often in Western New York cases include:
Maintenance contractors and property owners are expected to catch these conditions on inspection. When they do not, liability follows.
More than one party often shares liability. That works in your favor, because multiple defendants mean multiple sources of accountability.
The building or property owner is usually the primary defendant. New York premises liability law holds them responsible for keeping the property reasonably safe, and a machine in disrepair is a clear failure of that obligation. A shopping center in Cheektowaga, a medical building on Elmwood Avenue, an office tower near Seneca One on Main Street downtown, a hotel near the convention center on Delaware Avenue. They all carry this duty.
The escalator maintenance contractor is a separate defendant. These companies contract to inspect, service, and repair the machines on a schedule. If they miss a service visit, sign off on a defective condition, or use substandard parts, they can be held liable for injuries that result. Their service logs and inspection records often become the most important documents in the case.
Manufacturing defects are a third theory of liability. If the escalator failed because of a flaw in its design or how it was built, rather than from lack of maintenance, the manufacturer may face a products liability claim. This is distinct from premises liability but can run alongside it in the same lawsuit.
In wrongful death cases, where a family has lost someone due to a fatal escalator accident, surviving family members may bring a claim for wrongful death damages. These cases involve their own procedural rules and damage categories, and they require immediate legal attention.
Escalator injuries range from soft tissue strains to fractures, nerve damage, crush injuries, traumatic brain injuries, and spinal cord damage. The compensation available depends on what the injury actually cost you, financially and personally.
Our personal injury law firm pursues all available categories of damages. Economic damages cover the financial harm you can document: medical bills, future treatment costs, surgery and rehabilitation expenses, lost wages during recovery, and projected income loss if you cannot return to your prior work. These numbers can grow substantially when an injury requires multiple procedures or long-term care.
Non-economic damages cover the harm that does not show up on a bill. Pain and suffering is the primary category, and it accounts for the physical pain, the disruption to your daily life, the activities you can no longer do. Related categories include emotional distress, loss of enjoyment of life, and loss of consortium if the injury damaged your relationship with a spouse or partner.
Where the responsible party showed reckless disregard for public safety, knew about a dangerous condition for an extended period, and chose to do nothing, punitive damages may also be available. These are less common, but they belong in the conversation when the conduct was particularly bad.
The property owner has a lawyer. The maintenance company has a lawyer. The insurance adjuster working your claim has handled thousands of cases like yours. They are good at what they do, and what they do is minimize payouts.
That is not a figure of speech. Insurers move quickly after escalator accidents and elevator accidents alike, often reaching out to injured people before the full picture of their injuries is clear. Maintenance companies hold their own records. Surveillance video at malls, transit stations, and office buildings has a short retention window. Evidence that could win your case disappears when nobody is pushing to preserve it.
Our escalator injury attorneys in Buffalo start working immediately. We send document preservation demands before records go missing. Our premises liability lawyers will pull inspection logs, service histories, and complaint records. We build the factual record that shows who knew what and when. That early work is often the difference between a strong case and a weak one.
What changes for you when you work with our personal injury law firm? You stop fielding calls from adjusters who are not on your side. You have attorneys who know Erie County courts, who have handled New York premises liability cases through trial, and who are not interested in settling fast when settling fully is possible.
There are no upfront costs. Our escalator accident attorneys work on contingency. You only pay if we recover for you.
You were hurt on a machine someone else was responsible for maintaining. Rosenthal Kooshoian & Lennon, LLP is a personal injury law firm representing people across Western New York who were injured in escalator accidents. Our injury lawyers are ready to review your case at no cost. Call today to schedule your free consultation.
Our results are driven by personalized strategies that are hand-crafted to fit your needs.
You’re not just a client to us. You are our partner, and we would be honored to make you our next success story.
As former prosecutors and experienced attorneys, we can anticipate how your case will be handled by the other side and tactics insurance companies will use.