Joseph Lanni, Senior Associate

Location: New York, New York
Email: J.Lanni@fuchsberg.com
Phone: 212-869-3500 x254
Fax: 212-398-1532

Joseph Lanni is a senior trial lawyer with the firm. Mr. Lanni has nearly a quarter century of trial experience in the state and federal courts of the region. His career has focused primarily on representing plaintiffs in complex tort cases. He is often called upon to handle catastrophic personal injury and wrongful death cases involving medical malpractice, products liability, construction accidents, vehicle accidents, and premises liability. Mr. Lanni’s experience also includes representing plaintiffs in cases involving constitutional rights and civil rights, defamation, commercial fraud, financial malfeasance, business torts, employment contracts, life insurance benefits and Article 78 proceedings. In September 2010, Mr. Lanni’s law practice, which he ran for more than 10 years, merged with the Fuchsberg firm. Mr. Lanni has recovered substantial damages exceeding a million dollars in numerous cases in his career.

In 2009, Mr. Lanni’s extensive and highly successful work representing the family of a patient who became semi-comatose as a result of errors in the aftermath of orthopedic surgery was featured as the lead case in a nationally published investigation by Hearst Newspapers into medical errors in hospitals. In the mid to late nineties, Mr. Lanni was also plaintiffs’ counsel in cases emanating from “Dirty Thirty” police corruption scandal in New York. In those cases, Mr. Lanni successfully represented young men who had been wrongfully convicted and given draconian prison sentences based on the perjury and falsified evidence of corrupt NYPD officers. The “Dirty Thirty” cases also received attention in the mass media. Mr. Lanni won a landmark ruling in federal court during these cases in which the city’s claim of immunity for the civil rights and constitutional violations caused by the NYPD was entirely rejected. Mr. Lanni’s work in the area of constitutional and civil rights also received public attention in Peterson v. County of Nassau where he successfully persuaded a jury at trial to hold that two bus drivers had been wrongfully arrested and subjected to illegal searches and questioning based on racial profiling and his clients were awarded monetary damages in compensation. That case, too, was the subject of a newspaper article. In 2008, Mr. Lanni successfully represented a young widow and her 3 year old daughter against a life insurance company that refused to pay the benefits under a large insurance policy after the woman’s husband died in a fall from the roof of their house. Mr. Lanni presented the testimony of a forensic pathologist and other medical specialists to compel the insurance company to pay benefits to his clients and withdraw their wrongful refusal to pay.

Aside from trial work, Mr. Lanni has also achieved reknown as an appellate lawyer. Among that appellate work includes landmark rulings that successfully battled the interests of insurance companies and hospitals by broadening the admissibility of expert opinion testimony based on peer reviewed scientific literature and holding attending physicians legally responsible for the negligence of physicians’ assistants under their supervision.

Areas of Practice

• Medical Malpractice
• Products Liability
• Personal Injury
• Construction Accidents
• Vehicle Accidents
• Premises Liability
• Constitutional Rights & Civil Rights
• Defamation
• Commercial Fraud / Financial Malfeasance / Business Torts
• Employment Contracts
• Life Insurance Benefits
• Article 78 Proceedings

Litigation Percentage

100% of Practice Devoted to Litigation

Bar Admissions

1986 State of New York
1986 State of New Jersey
1986 U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York
1986 U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York
2002 U.S. District Court, District of Connecticut