Successfully Defended an Appeal of Summary Judgment in a Motor Vehicle Accident Case

We successfully defended an appeal of the trial court’s grant of summary judgment to the defendants in a motor vehicle accident case. The evidence indicated that, at the time of the accident, the plaintiff’s vehicle had stopped while partially merged from a service road onto the main traffic lane when it was struck by our clients’ truck, which was driving on the main lane, on the driver’s side of the plaintiff’s car. On appeal, the plaintiff argued our clients were a proximate cause of the accident. The Appellate Division, First Department rejected the plaintiff’s arguments and unanimously affirmed the trial court’s ruling. The First Department held the plaintiff’s contention, that he was stopped for 5 to 15 seconds before impact, does not change the fact that the defendant driver, who had the right-of-way, was entitled to assume the plaintiff would obey traffic laws and not merge until it was safe to do so. The First Department affirmed that a driver with the right-of-way who only has seconds to react to a failure to yield is not comparatively at fault for an accident.