Susan Karten

In the summer of 2015, after an eleven month trial over the May 30, 2008 tower crane collapse on East 91st Street in Manhattan, a jury held crane owner James Lomma, New York Crane & Equipment Corp., and J.F. Lomma, Inc. liable for the deaths of construction worker Ramadan Kurtaj, 27, and crane operator Donald Leo, 30. The awards against the Lomma defendants for Kurtaj's estate came to $55.5 million: $7.5 million for preimpact terror, $24 million for conscious pain and suffering, and $24 million in punitive damages, part of roughly $96 million in combined verdicts for the two families. Susan M. Karten of Susan M. Karten & Associates was trial counsel for the Kurtaj family. On September 12, 2017 the Appellate Division, First Department found the awards excessive and reduced the Kurtaj figures to $2 million, $7.5 million, and $9.5 million, a total of $19 million, and the Leo figures to $16 million, cutting the combined awards to about $35 million.

Amy Lam, a 34-year-old journalist, died roughly 11 hours after giving birth at home in West Harlem on August 1, 2016, after she was taken to Harlem Hospital Center because her placenta had not been expelled. At least five physicians treated her over about 10 hours, she received more than 20 blood transfusions, and her aorta dissected and ruptured in the operating room, leaving her with no blood volume. Her family, represented by medical malpractice attorney Susan Karten, sued in 2017, naming Harlem Hospital, New York City Health + Hospitals and five physicians, including Dr. Thomas J. Byrne, who performed a hysterectomy on Lam in the hours before her death. Attorneys for the hospital wrote in court records that what happened to her was a rare and unforeseeable lethal event, while Karten and her experts argued that her life could have been saved had the doctors moved sooner to find the source of the bleeding. The case settled for $3 million in 2020, with New York City Health + Hospitals as the only settling defendant.

Dr. Veronica Prego, a medical intern at Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn, pricked her finger in January 1983 on a needle that had been used minutes earlier to draw blood from a patient with AIDS, and she later tested positive for HIV. She sued the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation and two physicians in state Supreme Court in Brooklyn, saying the contaminated needle had been left in the patient's bedding instead of a disposal box. The hospital corporation denied negligence and its lawyer suggested at trial that Prego had drawn the blood herself. On the eve of summations in March 1990, after a nine-week trial, the corporation paid $1.35 million to settle, a figure Justice Aaron Bernstein disclosed only after the New York Post petitioned to lift a gag order. Susan Karten was one of the lawyers who tried the case for Prego.