NYC Compound Fracture Lawyer: Broken Foot, Ankle, & Leg Injury Attorneys

A compound fracture (technically known as an open fracture), is a broken bone that pierces the skin. Compound fractures almost always require surgery, internal hardware, IV antibiotics, and months of rehabilitation. They carry a serious risk of infection, nerve damage, and permanent loss of function.

When the break was caused by a car crash, a fall on unsafe property, or a construction site incident, New York law allows you to recover your medical costs, lost income, and the long-term limitations the injury has placed on your life.

At Raphaelson & Levine, our personal injury lawyers have spent over three decades representing New Yorkers with catastrophic fractures and serious orthopedic injuries. Since 1992, our firm has secured over $1 billion for injured clients.

Rated Best Lawyers in America® and Tier 1 Best Law Firms® for Personal Injury in New York City, we treat a compound fracture of the leg, ankle, or foot as what it is: not just a "broken bone" but a catastrophic event that requires trial-ready advocacy to hold insurance companies accountable for the decades of care these injuries often require.

What Is a Compound Fracture?

A compound fracture is any bone break where the bone, or the wound from the break, breaks through the skin. Orthopedic surgeons classify these injuries on the Gustilo-Anderson scale, from Type I (a clean puncture under one centimeter) to Type IIIC (extensive soft tissue damage with arterial injury). Higher classifications mean more surgeries, longer recoveries, and greater risk of permanent impairment.

Compound fractures differ from closed (or "simple") fractures in three ways that matter legally and medically:

• Infection risk. Exposed bone is contaminated on impact. Osteomyelitis, a deep bone infection, can turn a single surgery into a multi-year treatment course.
• Surgical complexity. Most compound fractures need open reduction internal fixation (ORIF) with plates, rods, or screws. Some require external fixators for weeks before definitive repair.
• Long-term impact. Patients often live with permanent hardware, reduced range of motion, chronic pain, or the need for future surgeries to remove or replace fixation.

Because the injury is severe, the damages in a compound fracture claim are typically much larger than a simple fracture claim, and insurers know it. That is why these cases are often contested aggressively, and why they benefit from a firm with 30+ years of trial experience in catastrophic orthopedic injury cases.

Broken Foot, Ankle, and Leg Injuries We Handle

Compound fractures in the lower extremities are among the most common serious injuries we see after car crashes, pedestrian strikes, and construction accidents. Our practice handles broken bones across the entire lower leg, ankle, and foot.

Leg fractures

• Tibia fractures, open or closed. The tibia is the most frequently fractured long bone.
• Pilon fractures (tibia shaft extending into the ankle joint)
• Femur fractures, including intertrochanteric and shaft breaks
• Stress fractures worsened into full breaks by delayed diagnosis

Ankle fractures

• Bimalleolar and trimalleolar breaks
• Achilles tendon ruptures with associated fracture

Foot fractures

• Lisfranc injuries (midfoot fractures and dislocations)
• Calcaneus (heel) fractures, typical after falls from height
• Talus fractures
• Metatarsal and toe fractures

Each injury has its own medical trajectory and its own compensation profile. A pilon fracture, for example, frequently ends a physical labor career even after a successful repair. A Lisfranc injury can cause lifelong arthritis regardless of surgical outcome.

Understanding how the injury will affect the rest of your life is the foundation of valuing your claim, and that is the work our serious and catastrophic injury attorneys specialize in.

What Causes Compound Fractures in New York?

In a large-scale clinical study, traffic accidents accounted for 54.2% of open fractures, followed by falls from height at 27.8% and occupational injuries at 12.5%.

In New York City, the common causes of compound fractures we litigate most often are:

Motor Vehicle & Pedestrian Accidents

NYC recorded 2,303 serious traffic injuries in the first three quarters of 2025, including 633 pedestrian injuries, and drivers failed to yield to pedestrians in roughly 30% of pedestrian-injury crashes citywide. A vehicle striking a pedestrian, or a crushing impact inside a vehicle cabin, routinely produces compound fractures of the tibia, fibula, femur, and foot bones.

Collisions involving trucks and large commercial vehicles are especially dangerous and frequently cause crush injuries and severe broken bones. Whether it was a failure to yield in Manhattan or a high-speed collision on the Long Island Expressway, we hold drivers and their insurers accountable.

Learn more:  Car accidents / Pedestrian accidents

Slip, Trip, & Fall Accidents

Roughly 47,000 slip-and-fall accidents are reported in New York City each year, generating 16,800 emergency room visits. Falls onto hard surfaces (icy sidewalks, wet subway platforms, uneven pavement) produce enough force to snap bone through skin, particularly at the ankle, wrist, and hip. Ground-level falls are the second most common mechanism for open fractures nationally.

Under NYC Administrative Code § 7-210, property owners are responsible for the sidewalks abutting their buildings. We have 30+ years of experience proving that "constructive notice" existed—that the owner should have known about the defect that broke your ankle or foot.

Learn more: Slip & fall accidents / Sidewalk accidents

Construction Site Accidents‍

The NYC Department of Buildings recorded 320 construction-related incidents and 10 fatalities in 2025, with Manhattan and Brooklyn accounting for more than 60% of all incidents. 74% of fatal construction incidents occurred on worksites with prior OSHA violations. Falls from scaffolding, ladders, and elevated platforms are a leading source of open tibia fractures among New York construction workers.

If you suffered a compound fracture falling from a ladder or scaffold, Labor Law § 240(1) may provide "strict liability." We specialize in proving that your injury wasn't a 'worker error' but a systemic failure of safety equipment, allowing us to pursue full damages under the Scaffold Law.

Learn more: Construction accidents

Motorcycle, Bicycle, & E-Scooter Collisions

Riders across NYC face direct impact with vehicles, road surfaces, and fixed objects with minimal body protection, which produces a high rate of open fractures to the foot, ankle, and lower leg. These cases often involve both the driver's liability insurance and the rider's SUM coverage.

Learn more: NYC motorcycle accidents / Bicycle accidents

In our experience, the cause of your break dictates the strategy of our investigation. It determines who is liable, which insurance policies apply, and what legal theories are available. A fall on a city-owned staircase triggers a 90-day Notice of Claim requirement. A construction fall triggers Labor Law protections. A Lyft or Uber rideshare crash triggers commercial policy limits. The right legal framework can separate a lowball offer from full compensation.

How New York's "Serious Injury" Law Affects Your Compound Fracture Claim

New York is a No-Fault state. For most motor vehicle accidents, your own insurance (PIP, or Personal Injury Protection) pays the first $50,000 of medical bills and lost wages regardless of who caused the crash. PIP doesn't pay for pain and suffering, and it does not pay for the long-term costs, like future surgeries, permanent disability, or reduced earning capacity, that define a serious compound fracture.

To pursue the at-fault driver for those damages, New York law requires your injury to cross a legal threshold. Under New York Insurance Law § 5102(d), a "serious injury" includes any fracture, simple or compound.

"Many insurers will try to categorize a compound fracture as a 'simple break' to minimize settlement offers. Because we have litigated these for decades, we know how to present surgical hardware as proof of 'permanent consequential limitation,' the threshold that unlocks full pain-and-suffering damages under New York's serious-injury law." — Howard Raphaelson, Partner at Raphaelson & Levine

A compound fracture automatically qualifies, which opens the door to a third-party liability claim for the full measure of damages: pain and suffering, future medical costs, loss of earning capacity, and loss of enjoyment of life.

The $50,000 No-Fault cap is exhausted quickly by a single compound fracture surgery. Everything past that point (the second surgery to remove hardware, the physical therapy, the years you cannot work at your previous capacity, the pain) is only recoverable through the third-party case.

Our broken bone injury attorneys build that case from day one, preserving evidence, retaining experts, and demanding the full value of your injury.

Compensation for Broken Bone Injuries in New York

Compound fracture and broken bone claims in New York generally recover four categories of damages:

1. Medical expenses. Emergency surgery, hospitalization, hardware, antibiotics, follow-up surgeries, physical therapy, and projected future care. Severe compound fractures routinely generate six-figure medical bills on their own.
2. Lost wages and lost earning capacity. Time out of work during recovery, plus, in more serious cases, the reduction in what you can earn going forward if you cannot return to your prior job.
3. Pain and suffering. The physical pain, emotional toll, loss of enjoyment of life, and visible scarring or disfigurement from the injury and the surgeries that followed. In catastrophic fracture cases with permanent hardware or ongoing limitations, this is often the largest component of recovery.
4. Future care. Additional surgeries, long-term physical therapy, assistive devices, and home modifications where necessary. In catastrophic cases, we retain certified life care planners to project medical, rehabilitative, and home-care costs over the client's lifetime. A formal Life Care Plan frequently adds six or seven figures to case value.

Knowing the categories is the easy part. Winning them takes three specific workstreams:

1. Life Care Planning: For catastrophic breaks, we hire experts to project the cost of future fusions, physical therapy, and home modifications.
2. Vocational Analysis: If you can no longer walk a construction site or stand for an eight-hour shift, we quantify that lifetime loss of income.
3. The Human Story: We document how you can no longer navigate the NYC subway, walk your dog in Central Park, or play with your children. This is where the real value of a case lives.

There is no typical settlement figure. Claim values swing widely based on the severity of the break, the strength of the liability proof, the defendant's insurance limits, and how the injury has changed the client's life and work.

What we can tell you is this: our firm has recovered over $1 Billion for injured New Yorkers since 1992, including verdicts and settlements in serious orthopedic injury cases across the five boroughs, Long Island, and Westchester.

How a Compound Fracture Changes Your Daily Life

Insurers discount what they cannot measure. The real cost of a compound fracture isn't the hospital bill, it's everything that doesn't show up on a spreadsheet.

You may not drive for months. You may miss your child's sports season, or be unable to carry them upstairs.

Returning to a physical job (construction, delivery, nursing, hospitality) can be slow or impossible. Simple routines like showering, cooking, or commuting on the subway become tasks that require planning. Sleep is interrupted by pain. Hardware sets off airport security. Weather changes ache in places that never hurt before.

Our broken bone attorneys build the full picture of your injury for the jury or the insurance adjuster: what your life looked like before the accident, what it looks like now, and what it will realistically look like five and ten years from now.

That work, not the medical bills alone, is what translates a fracture into full compensation.

How We Build a Compound Fracture Case

Partners Howard Raphaelson and Andrew Levine personally oversee catastrophic orthopedic matters.

Our process is designed to maximize "Non-Economic" damages, the parts of your life that don't come with a receipt.

On a serious fracture claim, our legal team:

• Secures treating-physician records, operative reports, and hardware specifications the day we are retained
• Retains independent orthopedic experts to project future surgeries, hardware revision, and permanent impairment ratings
• Works with vocational experts and life care planners to quantify lost earning capacity over the client's working life
• Reconstructs the accident with scene investigators, accident reconstructionists, and, on construction matters, Labor Law 240/241 specialists
• Pursues every available policy: tortfeasor liability, SUM, umbrella, and commercial limits on rideshare or trucking matters

That work product moves a case from a No-Fault file to a maximum compensation.

We Handle Broken Bone and Compound Fracture Cases Across All Five Boroughs

Raphaelson & Levine represents broken bone victims in every borough and on Long Island, with experience in the courts where these cases are decided:

• Manhattan: Compound fracture cases in Manhattan are filed in New York County Supreme Court (Civil). Dense pedestrian traffic, high-rise construction, and one-way street networks produce a steady volume of tibia, ankle, and foot fractures from crashes, pedestrian strikes, and Labor Law § 240 falls. (Office located at 14 Penn Plaza Suite 1718, New York, NY 10122.)

• Brooklyn: Cases filed in Kings County Supreme Court (Civil). Brooklyn consistently accounts for one of the highest shares of crash-related injuries citywide, alongside residential construction falls and sidewalk fracture claims across Kings County.

• Queens: Our injury attorneys handle compound fracture cases filed in Queens County courts. The borough's mix of multi-lane boulevards and residential streets produces a high volume of pedestrian strikes and frontal collisions that shatter the lower leg. (Office located at 136-68 Roosevelt Ave Suite 709, Flushing, NY 11354.)

• The Bronx: Our broken bone attorneys handle cases filed in Bronx County courts. Major arterial roads through the Bronx carry heavy commercial vehicle traffic, and premises cases from public housing complexes generate a steady share of slip-and-fall and stairwell fracture claims.

• Staten Island: Our injury attorneys handle compound fracture cases filed in Richmond County courts, including sidewalk, staircase, and auto-strike claims along Hylan Boulevard and the Staten Island Expressway corridor.

• Long Island: We represent broken bone victims in Nassau County and Suffolk County, where higher-speed roads and parkways produce the most severe pilon, tibia, and femur fractures we see. (Office located at 135 Crossways Park Dr Suite 404, Woodbury, NY 11797.)

If you were injured in one of these areas, we can meet at the office nearest to you, visit you at home or in the hospital, or begin the case entirely over the phone.

How Compound Fracture Lawsuits Work in New York

How much is my compound fracture lawsuit worth in New York?

Compound fracture claim values depend on the severity of the break, the surgeries and hardware required, permanent loss of function, lost wages, and the strength of the liability evidence. Cases involving multiple surgeries, nerve damage, or inability to return to work tend to resolve at higher values than single-bone fractures with full recovery. A case evaluation is the only way to estimate value based on your specific facts.

What is the difference between a compound fracture and a simple fracture?

A simple fracture, also called a closed fracture, is a break where the bone does not pierce the skin. A compound fracture breaks through the skin, leaving the bone or fracture site exposed. Compound fractures are considered orthopedic emergencies and generally require surgical repair, internal fixation with plates or rods, and a course of IV antibiotics to prevent infection.

Will my New York No-Fault insurance cover a compound fracture?

New York No-Fault insurance (also called PIP, or Personal Injury Protection) covers initial medical bills and lost wages up to the $50,000 basic economic loss limit. It does not cover pain and suffering, future earning capacity beyond the cap, or most of the long-term costs of a serious compound fracture. Because a fracture automatically qualifies as a "serious injury" under New York Insurance Law § 5102(d), you can bring a third-party liability claim against the at-fault driver or property owner to recover the damages No-Fault does not pay.

What if I was partially at fault for the accident?

You can still recover compensation. New York follows a pure comparative negligence rule under CPLR § 1411, which means your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault but never eliminated. Even if you are found 75% at fault for the accident, you can still recover 25% of your damages. This rule is more favorable to injured plaintiffs than the laws of most other states, so do not assume you have no case just because you believe you share some responsibility.

Can I sue for a broken foot or ankle from a slip and fall?

Yes, if the fall happened because a property owner failed to maintain safe conditions. Under New York premises liability law, owners of sidewalks, store floors, staircases, and apartment buildings can be held responsible when broken pavement, ice, spilled liquids, poor lighting, or defective stairs cause a fracture. You will need to prove the owner knew or should have known about the hazard and failed to fix it.

How long do I have to file a broken bone injury claim in New York?

New York's statute of limitations for most personal injury claims is three years from the date of the accident. Claims against the City of New York or other municipal entities, including injuries from defective sidewalks owned by the city or MTA-related incidents, require a Notice of Claim filed within 90 days and a lawsuit filed within one year and 90 days. These shorter municipal deadlines catch many injured people by surprise, so early legal review matters.

Discuss Your Broken Foot, Ankle, or Leg Claim With an Attorney Today

If a compound fracture or serious broken bone injury has disrupted your life because of someone else's negligence, a free case review is the fastest way to understand your options.

We will listen to what happened, review the medical records, and tell you honestly whether you have a case worth pursuing.

No upfront fees. We work on a contingency basis. You pay no attorney fees unless and until we recover compensation for you.

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