As reported by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in 2024, 39,254 people died in car accidents across the country, while the early estimates of deaths in traffic crashes in 2025 were set at 36,640, which is a 6.7% reduction.
Not every accident results in a wrongful death claim. Still, there are several reasons why the families of victims have financial problems after such an event.
And while filing a wrongful death lawsuit cannot bring back a loved one or undo the loss, the claim could cover expenses and ease the surviving family’s financial burden.
Understanding the applicable requirements can help families explore their legal options. Let’s take a closer look at how a wrongful death lawsuit works.
The Claim Does Not Belong to Whoever Is Grieving
Consulting a New York wrongful death lawyer is important to help you hold the liable party accountable for the death of a loved one. And although compensation cannot fully recompense the loss, the amount they receive could cover the financial needs of the surviving family members.
But the first question in any of these cases is who holds the claim. The answer comes from the statute rather than from the family.
In many states, the personal representative is the only person allowed to bring the suit; that is, someone must be appointed as the personal representative before the lawsuit is brought. In other states, the statute specifically provides for certain surviving persons who bring the suit themselves.
This difference seems like a procedure and almost never stays that way. Where an appointment must come first, the filing deadline keeps running while it happens. Families that think of the lawsuit starting when they are ready are usually surprised.
One Death Usually Produces Two Lawsuits
Most states run two separate claims out of a single death, and the two are often confused. The wrongful death claim compensates the survivors for what they lost. The survival claim is the decedent’s own case, the one they could have brought had they lived, carried forward by the estate.
The two are not interchangeable. They measure different losses, they can pay out to different people, and in some states they run on different deadlines.
A death that follows weeks of hospitalization tends to generate a substantial survival claim for the medical expenses and whatever the person went through before dying, while an instantaneous death may generate almost none.
A Loss Counts Only If the Statute Says It Counts
Here is where the state-by-state variation stops being academic. New York measures wrongful death damages by fair and just compensation for the pecuniary injuries resulting from the decedent’s death, plus medical and funeral expenses and interest from the date of death.
“Pecuniary” means financial. Grief and loss of companionship are not recoverable, though a minor child’s loss of a parent’s guidance can count as a financial loss.
Albany has tried to change that. A bill amending the same section to allow recovery for grief or anguish passed the Senate 51 to 10 in May 2025 and cleared the Assembly in June, then met a veto on December 5, 2025. Versions of it have reached the governor before and ended the same way, so the pecuniary standard still governs every wrongful death case filed in the state.
Most states are more generous than that. The practical effect is that two families with materially identical losses recover very different amounts depending on which side of a state line the death happened on, which is a feature of a statutory system rather than an accident of one.
The Will Usually Does Not Control the Money
One more surprise waits at the end. Wrongful death proceeds pass to the statutory beneficiaries rather than through the decedent’s will, so a person who left everything to a charity or to one child does not necessarily redirect a dollar of it.
Allocation among those beneficiaries is frequently its own proceeding, with a court weighing what each of them lost. Estranged family members covered by the statute may get their share in the recovery. On the other hand, individuals with close relationships with the deceased but who are outside the statutory class may be left out. This includes unmarried partners. The survival action is different because that belongs to the estate.
That split is why the two claims get tracked separately from the beginning rather than settled as a single number and sorted out later.
None of this tracks what the loss feels like, and it was never built to. A wrongful death statute answers a narrow set of questions about who may sue, for what and on whose behalf, and a legislature answered each of them separately in each state. Families that do the worst during the entire process are those who thought the answers would be clear.
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