What Do I Actually Keep From a New York Injury Settlement?

The honest answer is that on an ordinary New York injury case with modest medical bills, people tend to walk away with somewhere between half and two-thirds of the settlement figure. The exact number depends on three things, and they get paid in a fixed order.

The order of payment

Money never comes out in a jumble. It comes out in this sequence, and knowing the sequence is most of what you need.

Order	Who gets paid	Roughly how much
1	Your lawyer's fee	Up to one-third, or a sliding scale set by court rule
2	Case costs	A few hundred dollars up to five figures
3	Medical paybacks	Whatever Medicare, Medicaid, a hospital, a health plan or workers' comp paid for your care
4	You	What is left

That fourth line is the only one anybody actually cares about, and it is the only one no advertisement ever mentions.

A worked example

Take a $100,000 car accident settlement with a one-third fee, $5,000 of case costs, and $12,000 that Medicare paid toward your treatment.

Line	Amount
Settlement	$100,000
Legal fee (one-third)	−$33,333
Case costs	−$5,000
Medicare, after its reduction	−$7,400
You take home	$54,267

That is a real outcome, not a bad one. It is simply not $100,000, and the time to learn that is at the beginning rather than the end.

Why Medicare's number shrank

Medicare gets repaid for treatment related to your injury, but it does not collect the full amount. Federal rules cut its demand in proportion to the legal fee and costs that produced the recovery, on the theory that Medicare benefited from your lawyer's work. In the example above, a $12,000 bill came down to roughly $7,400. The reduction is built into the rules, but somebody has to ask for it.

The other people who may want paying back

• Medicaid can claim what it spent on your care. It ranks behind your lawyer's fee.
• Hospitals can file a claim for treating injuries someone else caused, and that also ranks behind the legal fee.
• Health insurance through an employer often has its own reimbursement right under federal rules rather than New York's.
• Workers' compensation gets repaid out of a recovery against a third party, reduced by a fair share of the fees and costs that produced it.
• Almost all of these are negotiable. What a firm gets knocked off these bills goes into your column, not theirs.

The bills that are never in the settlement at all

In a car crash, New York's No-Fault coverage pays the first $50,000 of medical bills and lost wages no matter who caused the accident. Those bills are handled on a separate track and are not part of the money your lawyer takes a percentage of. Two practical consequences:

• Your medical treatment does not come out of your settlement, up to that limit.
• No-Fault has its own short deadlines. Written notice to the insurer is due within 30 days of the crash, bills within 45 days of treatment, and proof of lost wages within 90 days. Miss them and you can lose coverage you were entitled to regardless of fault.

What moves your number the most

In rough order of impact:

• Whether the fee is figured before or after case costs. Same headline percentage, different check. On our example it is worth about $1,667.
• How hard the firm negotiates the paybacks. This is invisible from the outside and often worth more than a percentage point of fee.
• Case costs discipline. Experts are sometimes necessary and sometimes not.
• Whether the case is medical malpractice, which follows a lower fee schedule that starts at 30% of the first $250,000 and drops from there.

The document that proves all of it

When your lawyer receives the settlement money, New York rules require a closing statement: an itemized accounting filed with the court system's administrative office and sent to you. It lists the gross recovery, the fee, each cost and each medical payback.

• You are entitled to it. You do not have to ask nicely.
• Read it against your retainer agreement.
• Ask about any line you do not recognize. A line you cannot get explained is a line worth pressing on.

Before you sign with anyone

• Ask whether the fee comes off before or after costs.
• Ask what happens to the costs if the case is lost.
• Ask who handles the medical paybacks and whether they negotiate them.
• Ask when you can expect the closing statement.

A firm that answers those four clearly is telling you how the end of your case will go. A firm that waves them off is telling you something too.

The recovery calculator can help you see how illustrative fees, costs, and paybacks change the amount you might keep.

This article is general information about New York law, not legal advice for your situation.

Sources: 22 NYCRR 603.25 · 22 NYCRR 691.20 · Judiciary Law 474-a · 42 CFR 411.37 · CMS, Medicare's recovery process · Social Services Law 104-b · Lien Law 189 · Workers' Compensation Law 29 · Insurance Law 5102 · NYS DFS, No-Fault FAQs