As the managing partner of Pasternack Tilker Ziegler Walsh Stanton & Romano, LLP, Romano commands one of the most formidable workers’ compensation and occupational injury practices in New York.

Romano oversees a ninety-year-old firm with over 100 legal professionals operating across multiple offices stretching from Manhattan to the Hudson Valley. The firm has successfully represented more than 100,000 injured New Yorkers and secured billions of dollars in awards and settlements. Romano has been rigorously peer-reviewed, earning selection to the Super Lawyers list every consecutive year from 2010 to 2025, inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America (2021-2024), and recognition by The National Trial Lawyers as one of the Top 100 Trial Lawyers in New York.

Romano’s practice centers on workers facing delayed benefits, denied claims, occupational disease disputes, and contested appeals. He litigates catastrophic occupational exposure claims, challenges algorithmic quota injuries in the modern warehouse sector against logistics giants such as Amazon, and combats the misclassification of independent contractors within the gig economy. His team actively appeals adverse rulings to the New York State Appellate Division, Third Department, ensuring that state procedural frameworks protect workers rather than shielding corporations.

Through appellate practice and leadership in the workers’ compensation bar, Romano presses employers, carriers, and agencies to apply the law promptly to injured workers.

The Architecture of Administrative Exhaustion

When a worker falls from a scaffold in Brooklyn, or when a warehouse employee’s spine finally yields to the algorithmic demands of a modern fulfillment center, the resulting crisis is not merely physical. It is instantly transformed into a legal and bureaucratic conflict. To challenge an unjust denial of benefits in state court, a claimant cannot simply file a lawsuit; they must survive the legal doctrine of administrative exhaustion—a strict procedural mandate requiring them to litigate through every internal layer and appeals process of the Workers’ Compensation Board before they are permitted to seek judicial review in forums like the Appellate Division, Third Department. The injured worker is suddenly thrust into an asymmetric battle against an insurance carrier whose primary fiduciary duty (a legal obligation to act in the best financial interest of another party, such as its shareholders) is to maximize corporate profits, not to heal the injured. The carrier is armed with defense counsel, private investigators, and a network of medical examiners explicitly retained to minimize the severity of the injury. The system is designed to run on attrition. It counts on the claimant running out of money, patience, or hope.

Edgar N. Romano operates at the center of this battleground. As the managing partner of Pasternack Tilker Ziegler Walsh Stanton & Romano, LLP—a ninety-year-old plaintiffs’ firm with offices stretching from Manhattan to the Hudson Valley—Romano commands one of the most formidable workers’ compensation and occupational injury practices in New York. His career is a sustained counter-offensive against the procedural systems that seek to deny, delay, and diminish the legitimate claims of injured workers.

The firm has represented more than a hundred thousand clients and secured billions in awards and settlements, but the sheer volume of the practice does not dilute its intensity. For Romano, workers’ compensation is not a sterile administrative process; it is a high-stakes arena of civil rights and client harm. By forcing insurers to honor their statutory obligations and holding employers accountable for hazardous conditions, Romano and his firm ensure that the financial burden of industrial progress does not fall entirely on the broken bodies of the working class.

Toxic Latency and the Burden of Proof

A significant portion of Romano’s practice is dedicated to the most legally complex and scientifically contested area of workers’ compensation: occupational exposure to asbestos, industrial irritants, and toxic dust. Unlike a traumatic injury—where a severed limb or a shattered pelvis provides immediate, undeniable proof of a workplace accident—occupational diseases are characterized by long latency periods. A pipefitter may inhale asbestos fibers for decades without symptoms, only to develop mesothelioma (an aggressive, fatal cancer of the tissue that lines the lungs and other internal organs, caused almost exclusively by inhaled asbestos fibers) thirty years after retirement.

For insurance carriers, this latency is a potent defense. Defense attorneys routinely argue that the disease is the result of intervening lifestyle factors, environmental exposures outside the workplace, or simple aging. Defeating these arguments requires a highly sophisticated legal strategy. It demands the marshaling of complex epidemiological data, the retention of premier medical experts, and a granular reconstruction of a worker’s employment history from decades past. This grueling work is exemplified by representative matters handled by the firm’s appellate practice, such as Matter of Barton v. Consolidated Edison Co. of N.Y., Inc. (187 A.D.3d 1477 [3d Dept 2020]) and Matter of Glasgow v. Con Edison (3d Dept 2024). In both appellate matters, the firm relentlessly fought for widows seeking workers’ compensation death benefits long after their husbands had established claims for occupational diseases like asbestosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease stemming from exposures in the 1990s and earlier. In such cases, insurers heavily dispute the causal relationship between the decades-old exposure and the worker’s eventual death, requiring the firm to defend the medical evidence at every single administrative and judicial layer.

Romano’s expertise in toxic exposure is deeply embedded in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. When thousands of first responders and cleanup workers spent weeks breathing the pulverized glass, heavy metals, and carcinogenic ash at Ground Zero, the long-term health catastrophe was inevitable. Yet, the initial response from municipal and federal institutions was marked by bureaucratic friction and denial. Recognizing the profound institutional failure to protect these workers, Romano took on a pivotal advocacy role. He serves on the Advisory Committee of the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program at Mt. Sinai Hospital and the Advisory Board of the I.J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

In these roles, Romano is not merely litigating individual claims; he is operating at the intersection of public health and public policy. He helps navigate the complex evidentiary standards required to link specific cancers and respiratory diseases to the toxic soup of the World Trade Center site, ensuring that the legal frameworks evolve to meet the clinical realities of the responders who sacrificed their health for the city.

Algorithmic Quotas and Corporate Overreach

While legacy industrial hazards remain a core focus, Romano’s practice is equally attuned to the modern iterations of workplace danger. Today, the factory floor has been replaced by the massive, technologically hyper-managed e-commerce fulfillment center. The firm has taken a sharp, public stance against the labor practices of logistics giants such as Amazon, where algorithmic speed quotas are treated as sacrosanct, and human physical limits are viewed as inefficiencies to be optimized away.

The legal friction here is intense. When corporations mandate an extremely fast and often dangerous pace to meet rapid-shipping promises, the resulting injuries—severe musculoskeletal disorders, repetitive stress injuries, sprains, carpal tunnel syndrome, and bone fractures—are treated by the company as inevitable collateral damage. Behind the defense narratives of workplace safety programs, investigations have consistently revealed injury rates that vastly exceed industry averages. According to a report from the Strategic Organizing Center, there were 5.9 serious injuries for every 100 Amazon warehouse workers in 2020—nearly 80% higher than the rate of serious injury at warehouses of rival companies such as Walmart. By 2023, a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee investigation exposed that Amazon reported over 30% more injuries than the industry average, noting that Amazon warehouse employees are nearly twice as likely to suffer injuries compared to workers at other standard warehouses.

Romano’s firm actively challenges the subtle coercion embedded in these environments. Employees often report an unforgiving system where even brief slowdowns trigger warnings or disciplinary action. This constant strain turns routine tasks into high-risk activities. Furthermore, companies frequently utilize aggressive disciplinary policies to chill the reporting of injuries. For instance, policies that factor on-the-job injuries into an employee’s probation length serve as a powerful deterrent against filing a workers’ compensation claim. By challenging these practices, Romano exposes the raw abuse of power inherent in punishing a worker for the company’s own unsafe environment. Litigating these claims is a direct assault on a corporate model that prioritizes delivery metrics over human survival.

Furthermore, Romano’s firm aggressively challenges the systemic misclassification of workers within the modern gig economy. Companies frequently seek to classify workers as “independent contractors” to intentionally evade the financial responsibility of providing workers’ compensation coverage, Medicare, and unemployment benefits. The firm fiercely advocates for these gig workers, pointing out that when individuals work a standard schedule under direct supervision—such as the high-profile misclassifications involving companies like Epicurious—they are legally employees entitled to full protection. The firm likewise navigates the complex statutory protections established for rideshare and delivery drivers, ensuring that injured Uber and Lyft drivers secure their legally mandated workers’ compensation coverage through entities like the Black Car Fund (BCF).

The Administrative Crucible and Appellate Practice

The forums in which Romano operates—the New York State Workers’ Compensation Board and the federal administrative hearings for Social Security Disability—are distinct from traditional civil trial courts. They are specialized, insular, and heavily bureaucratic. To an unrepresented worker, the administrative apparatus is an impenetrable maze of filing deadlines, obscure statutory requirements, and highly technical medical terminology.

One of the most persistent institutional obstacles Romano confronts is the so-called “Independent Medical Examination” (IME). Insurance carriers possess the statutory right to have claimants evaluated by doctors of the carrier’s choosing. The structural reality is that these physicians are compensated directly by the insurers, creating an overwhelming financial incentive to find that the claimant has miraculously healed, requires no further surgery, or is fully capable of returning to work. The IME report is then weaponized by the carrier to terminate wage-replacement benefits and deny critical medical care.

Romano and his team must aggressively dismantle these reports on the record. This involves rigorous cross-examination of the carrier’s medical experts, exposing inconsistencies in their evaluations, highlighting the brevity of their physical exams, and asserting the clinical superiority of the injured worker’s actual treating physicians. When an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) issues a flawed decision—perhaps by improperly discounting the credibility of the injured worker or giving undue weight to a defense hired-gun—the firm pivots to aggressive appellate practice, frequently taking complex cases directly to the New York State Appellate Division, Third Department.

For example, in Matter of Gonzalez v. Chester U.F.S.D. (2023), the firm litigated on behalf of a worker seeking additional compensation under Workers’ Compensation Law § 15(3)(v) after exhausting a 52% schedule loss of use (SLU) of her right foot, fighting to prove the continuing impairment of her earning capacity against stringent board requirements. In Matter of Lewis v. NYC Administration for Children Services (2024), the firm represented a child protective services worker who suffered physical trauma and subsequent psychological injuries (including PTSD and acute stress disorder) after being attacked by a dog during a home visit. In Lewis, the firm actively challenged the Board’s restrictive evidentiary standards for psychological injuries, demonstrating Romano’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of case law to protect workers suffering from invisible wounds. It is trench warfare, fought document by document, deposition by deposition.

Building the Plaintiffs’ Counter-Weight

The defense bar in workers’ compensation is highly organized. Insurance carriers pool data, share strategies, and heavily lobby state legislatures to restrict benefits and cap liability. Historically, the plaintiffs’ bar was fragmented, consisting of solo practitioners and small firms fighting isolated battles against massive financial conglomerates.

Romano recognized early in his career that defeating concentrated corporate power requires a unified, sophisticated response from the claimants’ bar. He has dedicated significant energy to organizing and leading his peers. He served as the President of the Workers’ Injury Law & Advocacy Group (WILG) from 2008 to 2009, leading a national non-profit organization dedicated to representing the interests of injured workers and their families. Under his leadership, the organization expanded its capacity to track legislative threats, share appellate strategies, and counter the narrative dominance of the insurance industry.

He was also installed in May 2018 as the President of the Society of New York Workers’ Compensation Bar Association and serves as a member of the Leader’s Forum of the American Association for Justice, having previously chaired its workers’ compensation section. This extensive leadership portfolio demonstrates a commitment to systemic reform. Romano does not just practice the law as it is written; he actively engages in the legislative and professional discourse required to ensure the law remains a shield for the vulnerable rather than a sword for the powerful.

His impact on the field has been widely recognized. He was named a Fellow of the College of Workers’ Compensation in 2015, a distinction reserved for attorneys who have fundamentally elevated the practice. He has been explicitly named to the Super Lawyers list every consecutive year from 2010 to 2025, included in The Best Lawyers in America for Personal Injury Litigation – Plaintiffs (2021-2024), and is perennially recognized by The National Trial Lawyers as one of the Top 100 Trial Lawyers in New York (2011-2022).

Most tellingly, in 2024, the Workers’ Injury Law & Advocacy Group honored Romano with the N. Michael Rucka Lifetime Achievement Award—the organization’s highest honor. The award recognizes a career spent entirely on the side of the underdog, fighting a relentless, daily battle to ensure that the bureaucratic state process and the financial weight of the insurance industry do not crush the dignity of the injured worker.