Key Changes To New York Motor Vehicle Litigation Under The 2026 CPLR And Insurance Law Amendments

In late May 2026, Governor Hochul signed into law several amendments to both the New York Civil Practice Law and Rules (the CPLR) and the New York Insurance Law (the Insurance Law). The coordinated reforms to procedural and substantive laws were reportedly motivated by a legislative desire to “address . . . rising costs affecting motor vehicle insurance premiums” resulting from fraudulent and abusive practices.¹ Consequently, the amendments concern motor vehicle cases only. Portions of the amendments most relevant for civil defendants are outlined below. Note that the following amendments took effect on May 26, 2026, and apply to all actions and proceedings commenced on or after that date.²

1. Overhaul of New York’s Comparative Fault Principles

Perhaps the most impactful of the reforms is the amended text of CPLR Section 1411(b). The newly amended section reads as follows:

In any action to recover damages for personal injury³ subject to article fifty-one of the insurance law [motor vehicle] cases^, the culpable conduct attributable to the claimant shall bar recovery if the culpable conduct attributable to the claimant is greater than the culpable conduct of the person against whom recovery is sought or is greater than the combined culpable conduct of the persons against whom recovery is sought.

Translated into plain English, the new CPLR Section 1411(b) states that a plaintiff in a motor vehicle case is barred from any recovery where that plaintiff is more than 50% at fault.This is a departure from the pure comparative fault principles which New York State adopted in 1975 to temper the sometimes-harsh outcomes which resulted from contributory negligence, under which paradigm any amount of fault attributable to a plaintiff, no matter how small, barred that plaintiff’s recovery.⁴ On the other hand, in pure comparative fault jurisdictions, a plaintiff even 99% at fault is entitled to recover the single percent of damages caused by another party. By way of these amendments, New York jettisons a pure comparative fault paradigm and adopts modified comparative fault, somewhat of a middle ground between pure comparative fault and contributory negligence.

The amendments are silent concerning a jury’s right to hear of the law’s provisions at any point during trial. Such silence is sure to invite opposing challenges from both sides of the bar. While bright-eyed notions of justice would have us believe juries assess solely the merits of a given case, a sympathetic jury’s knowledge of these amendments could very well influence its members to subconsciously allocate fault in a way they might not have otherwise: If the difference between something and nothing is 1%, why notsimplyfind for the plaintiff? The amendments raise a further question: What number of automobile cases turn on such minute, single-digit percentages in the first place?

Far more concerning than the differences between 50%, 51%, or even 55% are those cases where, absent the amendments concerned here, a jury might ordinarily find a given plaintiff to have been 60% or 70% at fault. That juries may simply gloss over nontrivial fractions of fault to move the plaintiff’s game piece back to 50% is cause for alarm. The least that could be said about strict contributory negligence is that it was principled in its severity. There, a jury needed to find but a single percent of fault attributable to the plaintiff. Doing so was easy where the plaintiff’s actions manifestly contributed to the accident. Under the new law, however, juries may simply reverse engineer that same principle against defendants but to far more inequitable effect. Instead of needing to find only one percent against the plaintiff, juries may look to the defendant(s) for a tail on which to pin tens of percentage points representing fault the jury would otherwise have assigned to the plaintiff under purely comparative principles.

2. Elimination of the 90/180-Day Category

Somewhat less consequential is the elimination of the 90/180 category of serious injury. New York is a “no-fault” state. Before a plaintiff can sue a driver for pain and suffering (commonly referred to as non-economic damages), they must cross the threshold of “serious injury” by meeting one of the enumerated categories of injury outlined in Section 5102(d) of the Insurance Law. Until the time of the amendments here, a plaintiff was able to claim serious injury under the “90/180-day” category, under which it was necessary to show:

A medically determined injury or impairment of a nonpermanent nature which prevents the injured person from performing substantially all of the material acts which constitute such person's usual and customary daily activities for not less than 90 days during the 180 days immediately following the occurrence of the injury or impairment.

The elimination of this category will likely be felt primarily by defense counsel, since it provided a bright-line cutoff. With sufficient facts concerning the 180 days following a plaintiff’s accident, the 90/180-day category lent itself to summary resolution and, at the very least, gave defendants the opportunity to narrow the issues of a given case. That said, plaintiffs’ attorneys rarely bring a claim for serious injury under a single category of Section 5102(d). Instead, plaintiffs usually allege as many categories as reasonably possible. Injuries that might have prior been stated under this category may simply be recast, molded to fit the forms of the remaining injuries contained within Section 5102(d).

3. Liability Now Requires Negligence and Serious Injury

In New York, a party is generally entitled to statutory interest from the time liability is established.⁵ Because, however, the no-fault insurance paradigm requires the plaintiff to prove both negligence and serious injury in order to recover for non-economic damages, the unamended law left open the question of whether a finding of negligence alone fixed liability for purposes of calculating prejudgment interest or whether liability required a plaintiff to establish both negligence and proof of serious injury.

While the issue long vexed New York’s four appellate departments, the split has been resolved by this legislative intervention: Under the amendments to the Insurance Law, liability is now fixed only upon a finding of both (a) the tortfeasor’s negligence; and(b) a serious injury sustained by the plaintiff. Consequently, winning summary judgment on the issue of negligence alone is now insufficient to start the statutory clock ticking with respect to prejudgment interest. We expect plaintiffs to seek summary judgment on both negligence and as many serious-injury categories as their facts permit.

Conclusion

Considering the stated goals of the amendments, there is no apparent relationship between the reforms and fraud prevention or the reduction in insurance premiums. Instead, the amendments seem to constitute a roundabout way of encouraging earlier settlement, an outcome which may only tangentially lower payouts by insurance carriers, with a trickle-down benefit to insureds. Despite their defense-friendly veneer, the reforms are sure to invite motion practice and appellate challenges from all parties. At the risk of falling back on a law-school cliché, we can see both sides. The attorneys of Bond, Schoeneck & King PLLC will continue to monitor these and any further amendments affecting the rights of New York litigants.

Footnotes

1. N.Y.S. Dep’t of Fin. Servs. Insurance Circular Letter No. 3 (2026).

2. Id.

3. Actions for personal injury and actions for wrongful death are distinct classifications under the CPLR. Consequently, wrongful-death actions remain subject to New York’s pure comparative negligence regime.

4. See, e.g., Flynn v. New York, 103 A.D.2d 98, 100 (2d Dep’t 1984). See also N.Y. CPLR § 1413.

5. N.Y. CPLR § 5002.