Anthony T. DiPietro

DiPietro came to that work through medical malpractice. He earned his law degree magna cum laude from New York Law School in 1998, was admitted in New York the following year, and founded his own firm in 2003 after years of malpractice practice that taught him how hospitals actually run — how credentialing works, where complaints go, and how the meaning of a chart often depends on what sits elsewhere in the record. That clinical fluency became the foundation of one of the most consequential patient-safety practices in the country.

Columbia, Answered

Robert Hadden practiced obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University medical facilities for decades. A federal jury convicted him in January 2023 of inducing patients to travel for unlawful sexual activity, and that July a district judge sentenced him to twenty years in prison. The conviction adjudicated the doctor’s conduct. DiPietro’s cases pressed a separate question about Columbia University and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital: what did they know, when did they know it, and what authority did they decline to use?

Answering it took years of accumulation. By January 2025, his firm had filed 549 claims involving Columbia and NewYork-Presbyterian and assembled a documentary record bearing on years of alleged notice and response. In May 2025, a New York court approved a $750 million settlement resolving 576 Hadden-related civil cases — a resolution that, together with earlier rounds, brought the recoveries in the Hadden matters to more than $1 billion. In 2026, Columbia itself acknowledged failures in its handling of Hadden after an external review, described institutional changes, and disclosed more than one thousand voluntary settlements exceeding $1 billion in total.

The scale of the settlement conceals the granularity of the work. Managing hundreds of cases meant maintaining claimant identities, filing dates, medical histories, damages submissions, releases, and allocation records across hundreds of actions while preserving confidentiality — a process that had to work as one negotiation and, file by file, as the resolution of a single woman’s experience. No claimant could be reduced to a line in an inventory.

The Paduch Parallel

DiPietro brought the same architecture to the litigation involving Darius Paduch, a urologist who practiced at major New York medical institutions. A federal jury convicted Paduch in May 2024 of sexually abusing patients, including minors, and he later received a life sentence. On the civil side, DiPietro’s Paduch-related matters have produced more than $555 million for more than 425 survivors in resolutions involving NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Cornell Medicine, and Northwell Health.

The tracks around the civil cases kept confirming their premise. In July 2026, Weill Cornell Medicine entered an agreement with federal prosecutors resolving a criminal investigation into its handling of Paduch-related concerns — an agreement requiring compliance measures and the creation of a $30 million survivor-centered institute. The government’s inquiry and the patients’ civil claims proceeded on separate tracks with different burdens and remedies, but they converged on the question DiPietro had been pressing from the start: whether the organizations that granted a doctor access to patients used their power to protect them.

Who Knew What, and When

The proof in these cases has its own demands. A patient submits to an examination believing that the physician’s instructions, instruments, and touching all belong to legitimate care, and the treating hospital or medical practice creates and sustains that belief. A doctor’s conviction, however complete, does not by itself establish a hospital’s civil liability; that requires connecting credentialing files, complaint routes, scheduling practices, supervisory communications, and the power to restrict clinical privileges to the duties of the hospital or medical practice. DiPietro answers with paper — who knew what, when they knew it, and what authority they chose to exercise once information suggesting danger arrived.

That method explains the shape of his results. The $750 million Hadden settlement, the more-than-$1 billion in cumulative Hadden recoveries, and the more-than-$555 million in Paduch resolutions are not the product of a single dramatic verdict but of sustained, systematic assembly: hundreds of clients interviewed and protected, thousands of documents mapped against a timeline, and the medical organizations’ explanations tested against their own records. Additional claims remain pending, and the federal agreement imposes continuing obligations on Weill Cornell — the work, like the oversight it demands, is not finished.

Patient Safety as a Practice

DiPietro’s firm now spans offices in New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, and his practice runs across sexual abuse, patient safety, medical malpractice, wrongful death, and catastrophic injury.

What unifies the docket is a spare theory of accountability he has repeated for years: patient safety requires more than avoiding a negligent procedure; it requires someone who acts the moment a patient reports abuse. The doctors in his cases were convicted by federal juries; Columbia, NewYork-Presbyterian, Weill Cornell, and Northwell answered civil claims brought by his clients. In the space between those two propositions — between an individual’s crime and an organization’s duty — DiPietro has built a practice that has changed how New York’s most prominent medical institutions respond when the trust of the examination room is betrayed, and has secured for the patients who came forward both compensation and something harder to negotiate: acknowledgment from the hospitals and universities themselves that they should have listened sooner.