Richard P. Amico

The court first held that a notice of entry filed on the NYSCEF docket is service that starts the thirty-day clock for seeking leave to appeal, and that the clock runs party by party, so Ruisech's motion, filed thirty-one days after one defendant's service, was timely as to 200 Park, Tishman and CBRE. On the merits it held that 200 Park and CBRE had not shown that the pebbles were not a foreign substance under 12 NYCRR 23-1.7(d) or that they created no slippery condition, and it corrected the Appellate Division's reading of 23-1.7(e)(2): the rule reaches not only passageways but “floors, platforms[,] and similar areas where persons work or pass.” Both Industrial Code theories were restored against the owner and the manager.

The Twenty-Day Clock

William L. Steck, Jr. was seriously injured in a collision on August 18, 1992 and recovered $300,000, the limit of the other driver's policy. His own State Farm policy carried liability limits of $100,000 and $300,000 and $100,000 of underinsured-motorist coverage, and when State Farm denied the claim on the ground that the other driver's limits exceeded his own, he demanded arbitration on October 15, 1993. State Farm moved to stay the arbitration on February 15, 1994, four months later; the Supreme Court granted the stay and the Appellate Division affirmed over a dissent. Amico, then of Lewis & Lewis in Buffalo, argued Steck's appeal in the Court of Appeals on March 19, 1996. On April 25, 1996 the court reversed: CPLR 7503(c) gives a party served with a demand twenty days to seek a stay, the exception for parties who never agreed to arbitrate did not reach an insurer that had agreed and was disputing only whether the policy's conditions were met, and the coverage question belonged to the arbitrator. “The clear application of the statute and the case law require a reversal in this instance,” the court wrote, and it denied the petition to stay.

Monroe County, October 2013

Walter J. Nary, II won a jury verdict in Monroe County against Rosemary Jonientz for injuries from a motor-vehicle collision, and judgment was entered on April 10, 2012 before Justice Evelyn Frazee. Jonientz appealed, challenging the plaintiff's cross-examination of her medical expert about the expert's past compensation for examinations and testimony, the redactions to the expert's recorded testimony, and the size of the awards, and Amico defended the judgment. On October 4, 2013 the Fourth Department unanimously affirmed the judgment: the objection to the cross-examination had not been timely and specifically made, the redactions were within the trial court's discretion, the awards for past and future pain and suffering did not deviate materially from reasonable compensation, and the future medical expenses had been established with reasonable certainty.

February 6, 2016

At about eleven on the morning of Saturday, February 6, 2016, James L. Corter, fifty-five, was operating the trailer tipper at the Seneca Meadows landfill in Seneca Falls, a movable platform that holds a trailer, raises it and tilts it past sixty degrees so the refuse slides out the rear doors. Drivers and the tipper operator communicated over a designated CB channel as trailers backed onto the deck. Corter had left his cab to reach the hydraulic controls on the far side of the deck when a tractor-trailer driven by Robert S. Juliano, Jr., working for a subcontractor of Pocono Logistic, backed onto the platform; the truck had no backup alarm, its driver's radio was broken, and he did not see Corter and kept backing. Corter died at the scene. New York's fatality investigators, in a report published May 24, 2018, found the broken radio and the missing alarm and recommended that landfills keep trucks from backing onto a tipper deck while an operator is on it and require working radios and alarms on visiting vehicles.

Amico and Anna Robbins carried that record into the damages case brought by Michalla Corter-Longwell as administratrix of his estate. On May 16, 2023 the court entered judgment for $5,751,617.17: $3,000,000 for Corter's injuries and the loss of parental guidance, $477,053 in pecuniary loss and $2,274,564.17 in prejudgment interest.

Since 1989

Amico took his bachelor's degree in political science from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1985 and his law degree from the University at Buffalo in 1988, and he began practicing in 1989. He is Chief Trial Counsel of The Barnes Firm and Co-Chair of its Labor Law Department, based in Rochester, and he writes and argues his own appeals; by 2022 he had argued in each of the four departments of the Appellate Division and in the Court of Appeals. In March 2017 a client struck by a falling ceiling tile at the Walden Galleria settled for $2,000,000; in November 2018 a client who lost a leg in a snowmobile accident was awarded $24,600,000; in April 2020 he and Alex Bouganim settled a New York City construction worker's case for more than $9,000,000; and in March 2026, on the eve of trial in the Bronx, the New York City Department of Education paid $12,500,000 to a student burned in a failed science demonstration.

Seven Lanes of Walden Avenue

Cynthia Wiggins was seventeen, the mother of an infant son, and a part-time clerk at the Arthur Treacher's in the food court of the Walden Galleria in Cheektowaga, outside Buffalo. She rode the No. 6 bus to work from Buffalo; the mall's developer, the Pyramid Companies, did not allow that bus on its property, though tour buses carrying Canadian shoppers were, so the No. 6 stopped across Walden Avenue, seven lanes of traffic with no sidewalk, no crosswalk and no pedestrian signal, three hundred yards from the mall. On December 14, 1995, in freezing rain, she was crossing toward the mall when a dump truck driven by John P. Bunch struck her. She died on January 2, 1996. On January 28, 1996 the Buffalo News reported the bus ban, and within days, under the threat of a boycott, the mall let the No. 6 stop on its property.

Her father, Leonard Wiggins, and Rogelio Castellanos, Jr., the father of her son, sued the mall, Pyramid, the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority and the driver for $150 million. Amico was trial counsel with Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. when the case was tried before Justice Jerome C. Gorski of the Erie County Supreme Court in November 1999; the evidence included a former tenant's testimony that a Pyramid executive had told him before the 1989 opening that the No. 6 would not come onto mall property. After the first week of trial the defendants settled for $2,550,000, $2,000,000 of it from Pyramid and $300,000 from the transit authority, paid over the years to her son, Taquilo, then four. The Federal Highway Administration's pedestrian-safety guide for transit agencies now uses the case to show when an agency may be liable for where it lets its passengers off. By the time the case ended, the No. 6 had been stopping on the Galleria's property for almost four years.