3 Cases on the ‘Slender’ Nexus N.Y. Requires between Assault, Job

Courts & Compliance

When is an assault in New York in the course of employment? Under Workers' Compensation Law Sec. 21(1), an injury that arises in the course of employment is presumed to have arisen out of employment as well. When the injury stems from an assault, long-standing caselaw has maintained that so long as there is any nexus, however slender, between the motivation for the assault, an award of compensation may be sustained.

Here are three cases from the Empire State that have weighed in on the issue.

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Seymour v. Rivera Appliances, 28 N.Y. 2d 406 (N.Y. 1971)

The connection between the assault and the worker's employment was clear. The worker's only relationship with the person whose husband ended up killing the work was as a coworker. The worker "become involved to assist a 'damsel in distress,' a female coemployee being abused, so he thought, by a male worker. ... Decedent was not the aggressor, and he would not have become engaged in this quarrel had his employment not exposed him to it."

Rosen v. First Manhattan Bank, 641 N.Y.S. 2d 455 (N.Y. 1994)

Although the worker's death actually occurred in an 18th floor stairwell that was not technically part of the employer's premises, evidence that the worker was initially approached by his attacker, a coworker, in the lobby of the building where the employer's offices were located, upon arriving for his scheduled tour of duty, and that the two men rode the elevator that was the customary route to the employer's 17th floor offices, supported the conclusion that the assault was rooted in events started at or about the premises of the employer.

Timperio v. Bronx-Lebanon Hospital, 220 N.Y.S. 3d 654 (N.Y. 2024)

It was undisputed that the assault occurred in the course of the worker's employment, thereby triggering the Workers' Compensation Law Sec. 21(1) presumption. It was also undisputed that the record included no evidence of the motivation for the assault or any indication of a prior relationship between the assailant and the worker. They never worked together.

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