Workers’ compensation was built on a simple promise. In exchange for giving up the right to sue their employers, injured workers would receive prompt medical care and wage replacement without having to prove the employer’s fault.
The system was never designed to make workers whole. It was designed to provide certainty and speed. But after years of representing injured New Yorkers, I have come to believe that the greatest threat to that promise is no longer outright denial. It is delay.
Today, an injured worker can spend years navigating hearings, treatment authorization requests, physician depositions and appeals before receiving the benefits the law was intended to provide. Meanwhile, mortgages come due, injuries worsen and families still need to eat. At some point, delay ceases to be an administrative inconvenience and becomes the functional equivalent of denial.
Consider M.H., a client of my firm who was injured at work on Jan. 5, 2024. His claim was filed that month, but the insurance carrier controverted every single aspect of the case. Our first appearance before the Board took place five months later in May. We were directed to produce additional medical evidence. The resulting decision specifically designated the case as “expedited.”
Apparently, “expedited” is a term of art. The next hearing did not take place until six months later, when additional depositions were ordered. An evidentiary hearing followed in January 2025, except the wrong translator was provided. We returned in March for final testimony. Then, in May, we were directed to produce even more records.
Finally, in August 2025, more than a year and a half after M.H. was injured, a Workers’ Compensation Law Judge decided all issues in his favor.
That still did not end the waiting. The carrier appealed. We filed our opposition less than a month later. Then M.H. waited nearly another year while the appeal remained unresolved and the benefits and medical bills awarded to him remained unpaid.
The appellate Board finally issued its decision this month. It affirmed the findings across the board. After more than two and a half years of litigation, two levels of adjudication had reached the same conclusion, to wit, that M.H. was entitled to benefits.
Nicole Brenecki is a founding partner at Jodre Brenecki LLP
The wait was not quite over. When payment finally arrived, our calculation showed that M.H.’s wage benefits were short by a five-figure amount. As such, after winning before the Law Judge, waiting nearly a year for an unsuccessful appeal and winning again, we have now been forced to request yet another hearing simply to obtain the money he was already awarded.
If that is what New York calls an expedited workers’ compensation case, injured workers would be forgiven for wondering what ordinary speed looks like.
To hear the Workers’ Compensation Board tell it, however, the system is becoming more efficient. Its 2025 Annual Report points to faster hearing schedules, quicker processing of treatment authorization requests and technological improvements. By the end of 2025, the Board reported that hearings were being scheduled, on average, within 35 to 37 days of a request.
Those improvements deserve recognition. But they raise a more important question: Are we measuring the things that actually matter to injured workers? In 2025, the Board held 244,714 hearings. Yet only approximately 68 percent resolved all the issues presented at the hearing. New York also entered 2026 with 7,954 administrative appeals awaiting resolution.
A hearing scheduled quickly is not necessarily a dispute resolved quickly. An appeal processed through the system is not necessarily an injured worker receiving benefits. Administrative activity and actual justice are not the same thing. The right to contest a claim and appeal an erroneous decision must, of course, be protected. Due process matters to every participant in the system. But due process cannot become a process without end.
M.H. did not experience his case as a collection of administrative transactions. He experienced more than two and a half years of his life. That is why perhaps the most important statistic New York could publish is also the simplest: From the day an injured worker enters the system, how long does it actually take until that worker receives the medical care and wage replacement the system was created to provide?
There is something uniquely dispiriting about a system that fails not because nobody knows how to fix it, but because we slowly learn to accept its failures as normal. A year for an appeal becomes a “backlog.” An injured worker waiting for treatment becomes a “pending claim.” Eventually, the language of administration becomes so detached from the lives underneath it that delay itself begins to sound ordinary.
It should not. New York has the lawyers, physicians, judges, technologists and public servants capable of designing a workers’ compensation system that protects due process without allowing procedure to swallow its purpose. What is required is the willingness to look beyond statistics measuring how efficiently the system processes paperwork and ask the harder question as to how efficiently it protects New Yorkers.
Systems that human beings designed can be redesigned by human beings willing to understand them. New York has the resources, talent and institutional capacity to do better. What it needs now is urgency. The measure of a functioning society is not how elegantly it administers a promise. It is whether, when someone finally needs that promise kept, the system is capable of keeping it.
Nicole Brenecki is a founding partner at Jodre Brenecki LLP