Edgar N. Romano

Sylvia Leroy’s Claim

Sylvia Leroy worked as a registered nurse in a Brooklyn hospital during the opening weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.

She became ill after her final shift, was diagnosed with COVID-19 and pneumonia, and experienced catastrophic complications that left her unable to testify about her own workplace exposure.

That fact defines the case. Workers' compensation ordinarily begins with the injured worker describing what happened — the fall, the lift, the machine. Here the person who knew what her shifts had been like could not say so.

Pasternack Tilker Ziegler Walsh Stanton & Romano LLP represented Leroy, and Michael K. Gruber handled the appellate proceedings for the firm.

Proof Assembled From the Shape of a Life

Leroy's husband testified.

He described the two nurses and the physician she worked with who contracted COVID-19, the other staff members and patients on her floor with compatible symptoms, and the way her work required contact across hospital units.

He also described what she had not done: her limited activity outside work, and the absence of any diagnosed case in the family before hers.

That is a proof built by elimination and proximity rather than by observation. It establishes that the workplace was dense with infection, that her duties put her in contact with it, and that no other plausible source existed — without anyone ever testifying to the moment she was exposed.

The Workers' Compensation Board weighed that testimony together with the incubation period and the prevalence of infection at the hospital. The carrier's untimely pre-hearing statement limited the defenses and evidence it could present. The Board credited the testimony, found an elevated workplace exposure risk, and established the claim for COVID-19 and its resulting complications.

Proving Workplace Exposure

In December 2023, the Appellate Division affirmed, and held that a claimant could prove workplace COVID exposure through either a specific contact or an unusually prevalent workplace infection — without identifying the precise instant of transmission.

The proof came from the people around Leroy, the timing of her deterioration, and the medical evidence connecting those facts — a record that supplied the workplace chronology she could not give herself.

The Accepted Accident

Monique Lewis was knocked into the side of a house by a dog during a child-protective-services visit.

Her employer accepted the chest injury. A Workers' Compensation Law Judge established the related psychological conditions and awarded benefits.

The Board then applied the heightened rule that governs claims for ordinary workplace stress — a demanding standard designed for cases where the alleged injury arises from the pressures of a job rather than from an event.

In October 2024, the Third Department held that the accepted physical impact was already the workplace accident, and remitted the case for the proper medical-causation determination.

The distinction is not technical. Being thrown into a wall by an animal at a stranger's house is not the accumulated pressure of a difficult job; it is an accident, and the employer had already conceded as much when it accepted the chest injury. Once an accident exists, the only remaining question is medical causation — whether this accident caused these conditions — rather than whether the working conditions were unusually stressful compared with everyone else's.

Schedule Loss and Total Disability

Hamidou Ramadhan was cleaning a hotel kitchen when grease splashed into his face and injured both eyes.

The system awarded him a one-hundred-percent schedule loss of use of both eyes. Because he retained some vision, however, the Board declined to classify him as permanently totally disabled.

The two categories are not variations in degree; they are different instruments.

A schedule-loss award is capped by the statutory number of weeks assigned to the injured body part. It compensates the loss of the part. Permanent-total disability reflects the permanent loss of wage-earning capacity and carries no statutory limit on the number of weeks payable. It compensates the loss of a working life.

Ramadhan argued that the statutory category of "loss of both eyes" did not require absolute blindness.

In January 2012, the Third Department returned the matter to the Board, requiring it either to follow an earlier permanent-total-disability decision involving a claimant who had retained some vision, or to explain why his case was different.

That is a modest-sounding disposition with real force. An agency administering a statute across thousands of cases may reach different results, but it must be able to say why — and being required to distinguish its own precedent is often the point at which an inconsistency becomes visible.

Protecting a Retired Firefighter’s Award

Adam Schulze could not return to firefighting after neck and back injuries, and later entered performance-of-duty retirement.

The City had paid his salary under General Municipal Law § 207-a(1), then supplemented his state pension under § 207-a(2). When Schulze later received retroactive workers' compensation payments, the City sought approximately $106,000 from his award.

Richard T. Cahill Jr. of Romano's firm represented Schulze in the Court of Appeals.

In April 2025, the court held that § 207-a(2) payments were pension supplements to a retired firefighter — not wages or wage-like advances — so the City could not reach his workers' compensation award under the wage-reimbursement statutes.

The reimbursement rules exist to prevent double recovery of wages: an employer that kept paying an injured worker may recoup that money from a later compensation award covering the same lost earnings. A pension supplement is paid because the firefighter has retired and is no longer earning wages. Treating it as a wage advance would let the City recoup a payment made for that separate purpose.

Register Before the Illness Exists

Occupational disease law must account for conditions that appear long after an exposure ends.

Romano's docket has always included the slow injuries — occupational exposure, asbestos, industrial irritants — the cases in which the harm arrives on the disease's schedule rather than the statute's. No exposure made that mismatch more visible than the one at the World Trade Center.

Responders and cleanup workers encountered dust, combustion products, fibers, and chemicals, while respiratory disease, cancer, gastrointestinal disorders, and psychological conditions emerged on different timelines — some within months, some after many years.

New York's World Trade Center workers' compensation structure permits a worker or volunteer who participated in rescue, recovery, or cleanup to register that service through Form WTC-12 before any diagnosis exists. Registration preserves the ability to bring a future state compensation claim if a qualifying condition develops.

The mechanism inverts the usual sequence. Ordinarily a claim follows an injury. Here the filing precedes the illness, because the ordinary filing deadline would otherwise expire during the latency period — extinguishing the claim before the disease that would support it ever appeared.

The legislature repeatedly reopened the registry for that reason. The resulting framework protects registered participants' ability to pursue occupational-disease benefits when illness arrives years after the exposure.

Three Systems, One Responder

The state registry is separate from the federal World Trade Center Health Program and the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.

A responder may need all three: one for medical monitoring and treatment, one for compensation for economic loss, and one for state benefits tied to employment and disability. Each has its own eligibility rules, its own filing requirements, and its own deadlines, and none of them coordinates with the others on the claimant's behalf.

Romano serves on the advisory committee of Mount Sinai's World Trade Center medical program and the advisory board of the I.J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine, working with clinicians and researchers documenting illnesses that may not become legally actionable until years after exposure. The roles connect medical documentation of latent disease with the eligibility and causation questions that determine benefits.

The First Person Told

Workers' compensation practice brings medical records, wage histories, statutory formulas, and administrative procedure together around a single question: whether an injured person receives treatment and income while unable to work.

Much of the record that decides it is created by people who are not lawyers, before anyone anticipates a dispute.

A union representative may be the first person told about an injury. A treating clinician creates the record establishing diagnosis, disability, causal relationship, treatment need, and work restrictions. Detail preserved at those moments can shape a case years later — which is why Romano has lectured extensively to labor unions and medical providers as well as to lawyers. Those lectures address the records that often become central when a later claim is disputed.

Practice

Romano graduated cum laude from Brandeis University in 1991 and earned his law degree from The John Marshall Law School in 1995. He is managing partner of Pasternack Tilker Ziegler Walsh Stanton & Romano LLP, a firm that has represented injured New Yorkers for more than nine decades, from offices across New York City, Long Island, Westchester, and the Hudson Valley.

He has served as president of the Workers' Injury Law & Advocacy Group, the national organization of claimant-side compensation lawyers; as president of the Society of New York Workers' Compensation Bar Association; and as chair of the American Association for Justice's workers' compensation section, where he remains a member of the Leaders Forum. He was named a Fellow of the College of Workers' Compensation Lawyers in 2015, and belongs to the New York State Bar Association, the New York State Trial Lawyers Association, the Jewish Lawyers Guild, and the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health.

As managing partner, he oversees case selection, evidentiary development, briefing, staffing, and continuity in matters that can run from initial filing through medical development, hearings, Board review, classification, treatment disputes, later changes in disability, and appeals to the Third Department or the Court of Appeals.

Because such matters can remain open for decades, continuity across medical development, hearings, later disability changes, and appeals is a material part of the representation.