New York: Party Stuck With Settlement Stipulation Offered in Open Court

A New York appellate court recently held a plaintiff was bound by his attorney’s open-court stipulation with defendants that the case had been settled for $325,000. Plaintiff could not later declare the settlement “null and void” because there was no written agreement when he determined his recovery would be smaller than anticipated due to a workers’ compensation lien and a Medicare Set-Aside provision. Reversing a state trial court’s decision that held there was no enforceable agreement, the appellate court stressed that the stipulation by and among the parties formed an independent contract that would be enforced absent a showing of fraud, duress, overreaching, or unconscionability. Plaintiff had sustained injuries in a work-related accident. He filed a civil action against various defendants alleging Labor Law § 241(b) violations and common law negligence. One the defendants filed a third-party action against the worker’s employer. The case “settled” on the first day of trial, before a jury was chosen.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Lenge v Eklecco Newco, LLC, 2019 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 3626 (May 8, 2019)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 131.05.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see