Brett R. Leitner, Esq.

Defense-side training, plaintiff-side conviction.

I’m Brett Leitner, a New York trial attorney. My practice is built around nursing home neglect and abuse, medical malpractice, construction accidents and catastrophic injury — the cases that take real investigation and a firm willing to try them.

A nursing home fall that a chart says never happened. A cancer found a year late. A worker who fell because nobody secured the scaffold. These cases turn on records, staffing data, experts and the willingness to put a case in front of a jury. That is the work Brett has built his practice around, in New York City and across Long Island.

He developed his trial and litigation skills at national AmLaw 100 and AmLaw 200 firms representing sophisticated corporate clients — counseling, risk management, litigation management, trial and appellate work. He then served as a senior trial attorney in the Nursing Home Litigation Unit of a nationally recognized personal injury and mass tort firm, representing victims of catastrophic accidents, medical malpractice and nursing home neglect across New York State. Having seen how institutions defend these cases, he knows where the proof is kept.

He went on to found the firm now known as Leitner Warywoda, PLLC. His work has recovered more than $200 million for clients (firm-reported) and has drawn coverage in The New York Times, the New York Law Journal, Newsweek, ABC News and CBS News — and made him a lawyer other lawyers call when a case is high-profile or hard.

Clients tend to describe the same two things: someone who prepares relentlessly, and someone who treats a family’s worst year as if it were his own.

Select Verdicts & Settlements

• $8.5M — Medical Malpractice: products liability, fatal surgery verdict (Queens County)
• $7.89M — Municipal Liability: civil rights verdict (E.D.N.Y.)
• $6.9M — Labor Law: construction accident
• $3.3M — Labor Law: construction accident
• $3.0M — Labor Law: union ironworker accident
• $2.6M — Labor Law: construction accident
• $2.5M — Medical Malpractice: failure to diagnose cancer
• $1.9M — Medical Malpractice: post-operative infection
• $1.3M — Nursing Home: fall accident

Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Certain matters handled with co-counsel.