• 212-827-4501
07 Jan 2026
blog, Manhattan, Michael Mezzacappa, News Permalink

Ban Battery Bombs

January 7, 2026
Michael Mezzacappa, Partner & General Counsel at Coffey Modica, wrote an insightful letter to the editor on the latest BESS fire in New York State, published by Long Island’s South Shore Press.
By Michael P. Mezzacappa | January 2, 2026

Despite countless protests across the state, New York’s leaders have pressed onward in trying to force Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) developments on unwilling communities. Now, as Warwick has faced the third fire at its BESS facility in two years, it is time for change.

Proposed BESS facilities have caused protest and uproar across the state, from communities in the Hudson Valley to residential neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn, and towns across Suffolk County. Residents are rightfully concerned about the risks these facilities bring with them.

BESS facilities use massive lithium-ion batteries, and residents across the state are rightfully concerned about the risks these facilities bring with them. When these batteries catch fire, they explode, emit toxic chemicals, and burn hotter and longer than normal fires, making them difficult for firefighters to put out.

New York City has been plagued by fires caused by the lithium-ion batteries in e-bikes. Since 2022, 900 such fires have resulted in 30 deaths and 400 injuries. In early 2025, the BESS facility at the Moss Landing Power Plant, about 100 miles south of San Francisco caught fire, burning for days. 1,500 people were forced to evacuate. In the aftermath, “extremely high” concentrations of heavy metals were found in nearby bodies of water.

Towns like Islip and Brookhaven have wisely adopted moratoriums on the development of such facilities. However, New Yorkers cannot rely on a patchwork of local regulations. Statewide action is needed to install the necessary safeguards that ensures the safety of our communities before any further development is continued. We cannot afford to wait for an event like this to turn deadly before we take action.

Michael P. Mezzacappa, a partner and general counsel with Coffey Modica, represents clients in litigation involving lithium-ion battery explosions and fires.

###

30 Oct 2025
Adam Greenberg, Amanpreet Dhaliwal, blog, Jonathan Heller, Maxwell Bottini, Michael Coffey, Michael Mezzacappa, News Permalink

Six Coffey Modica Attorneys Recognized Among 2025 Super Lawyers

October 30, 2025
Firm’s attorneys recognized for excellence across litigation, insurance defense, construction, and complex liability matters throughout the East Coast.
October 30, 2025

Coffey Modica LLP announced that six of the firm’s lawyers, including founding partner Michael Coffey, have been named among Super Lawyers’ top attorneys for 2025. Each year, Super Lawyers recognizes outstanding attorneys across the United States based on independent research, peer nominations, and professional achievement. No more than five percent of attorneys in each state are selected to the Super Lawyers list, and only 2.5 percent are named Rising Stars.

Coffey, a founding partner of Coffey Modica LLP, has handled many of the largest insurance-related claims and litigated matters in New York State over the past 25 years. He has served as defense counsel in more than 125 jury trials and has successfully arbitrated and mediated over 300 cases.

Coffey, along with Partners Michael P. Mezzacappa and Adam Greenberg, were named to the 2025 New York Metro Super Lawyers list—an honor reserved for attorneys who exhibit excellence in practice.

Mezzacappa, who also serves as the firm’s General Counsel, is a veteran trial attorney with more than 35 years of experience representing insurers and their insureds. Greenberg brings more than 25 years of experience as a defense attorney to his role at the firm, having litigated everything from toxic tort claims to complex appellate matters. Both attorneys are based at Coffey Modica’s Westchester County headquarters in Tarrytown.

Additionally, Partner Maxwell Bottini and Counsels Jonathan Heller and Amanpreet Dhaliwal were named 2025 Rising Stars.

Bottini represents clients in complex matters involving construction litigation and defects, product liability litigation, transportation, premises liability, and domestic and international reinsurance transactions, including captive matters, as well as excess liability and casualty. He practices in both New York and Connecticut.

Heller advises insureds throughout New York State on labor law, general liability, and casualty matters. His practice focuses on high-exposure medical malpractice, premises liability, labor law, and property damage matters.

Dhaliwal practices out of Coffey Modica’s Manhattan office, specializing in construction-related matters, general liability, and complex litigation.

“To see so many members of our team recognized is a testament to the deep bench of talented, knowledgeable lawyers we have here at Coffey Modica, offering best-in-class service for our clients each and every day,” said Founding Partner Michael Coffey.

With offices spanning New York City, Buffalo, Suffolk County, and Tarrytown, NY, as well as Westport, CT, Jersey City, NJ, Sandy Springs, Georgia, and Palm Beach County, FL. Coffey Modica’s recognition in Super Lawyers underscores the firm’s continued growth and reputation as a premier East Coast litigation firm providing complete solutions for complex matters.

###

27 Jun 2025
blog, Fires & Explosions, Michael Mezzacappa, News Permalink

Battery electric storage is no silver bullet

June 27, 2025
Coffey Modica partner, Michael Mezzacappa, published an op-ed in the Staten Islander. In the article, Michael weighs in on the controversy surrounding proposed battery storage facilities being built across the borough.
By Michael Mezzacappa | June 27, 2025

As New York lawmakers push forward with green regulations intended to reduce the region’s greenhouse gas emissions, local authorities have rolled out the construction of battery energy storage systems (BESS) at a quite rapid and alarming rate, as if it were a silver bullet. As New York plans on building one of the largest BESS sites in the nation on Victory Boulevard, which alone would power 10% of the climate goals of the entire state, it must heed the concerns of its residents.

To date, New York is home to more than 6,304 such facilities, and even more are proposed for New York City’s five boroughs. Residents are concerned about this unstable technology, and rightfully so.

Designed to take the place of a small power plant, BESS centers use super-sized lithium-ion batteries, otherwise commonly found in everything from phones and computers to electric scooters and plug in cars. Lithium batteries have drawn oversized attention due to a growing number of fires caused by the explosion of e-bike batteries.

Lithium-ion fires are known for burning hotter and faster than ordinary fires and they also emit toxic chemicals, further complicating any fire department’s ability to successfully combat them.

It is a fact that a fire sparked by one small lithium-ion battery from an electric bike or scooter, with motors of 250 to 500 watts, can take down an entire apartment building. Now, New York regulators are allowing companies to locate entire buildings full of these unstable batteries in the middle of residential areas, next to homes and even schools. A facility planned for Mariners Harbor would be 5 MW (megawatts), 10,000 times the power of a battery for an e-bike.

There are currently 11 BESS facilities on Staten Island, and a total of 24 more of these projects have been additionally approved to be located here since 2020—including one that is planned to go up around the corner from where I grew up in West Brighton, a community of over 26,000 and one of the most densely-populated areas on the Island. The thought of what could happen should one of these sites catch fire is horrifying.

On the West Coast, Californians learned these lessons all too well. The Moss Landing Power Plant, 90 minutes south of San Francisco, has caught fire multiple times, including the Valley Center fire in 2023 and Otay Mesa fire in 2024. This January, as wildfires raged across Southern California, firefighters were also forced to contend with yet another lithium battery farm fire at the 630-megawatt (MW) site.

Yet this time it was far worse than previous incidents in 2021 and 2022, as 1,200 civilians were forced to evacuate, due to the emission of toxins, as the firefighters had to let the fire burn itself out, rather than risking damage to their lungs. After residents returned, many also reported feeling unwell. Then, a month after the initial blaze, the battery storage farm reignited, a total of five ignitions in as many years.

While Moss Landing, CA was over half a mile from any major residential area, imagine if this occurred in our backyard, like Charleston, Concord or Rossville.

FDNY deserves the utmost credit for their aggressive crackdown on illegal battery manufacturing and repair sites, and their ingenious methods of fighting lithium-ion battery fires, including special blankets to snuff out electric bike or car batteries. But even they would be challenged by one of these toxic infernos, lacking a large enough suppression system capable of extinguishing an industrial-sized lithium-ion battery farm fire.

Let us not forget that so many of these lithium-ion batteries are manufactured in China, which has cornered the lithium-ion battery market. China is responsible for nearly 80 percent of the global lithium battery production, and those manufacturers do not hold themselves to rigorous manufacturing and safety standards. When something goes wrong with their product, they often never respond to court summonses and generally carry no liability insurance. We also cannot easily obtain jurisdiction over these companies. I know that from personal experience.

This BESS technology remains highly unstable, and that scientific fact will not change, simply because policymakers want it to. I have litigated too many wrongful death and serious injury cases linked to the explosions of lithium-ion batteries to ever be an optimist on this matter.

Rather than recklessly embracing this technology simply to satisfy the state’s lofty climate goals set by the New York Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which calls for reducing emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and 85 percent by 2050, Staten Island, New York City and our state leaders should seriously consider a moratorium on further BESS construction in residential areas and near schools. New York would do well to heed Assemblymember Michael Tannousis’ (R-Great Kills) calls for stricter safety regulations and mandatory community input before forcing more of these potentially dangerous sites on the public.

If New York’s leadership does not heed these lessons, and the concerns of their constituents, it will be to all our detriment.

The following answers were provided by Mr. Mezzacappa to Staten Islander’s questions, which are below: 

Is there anything that is being done about the BESS sites on Staten Island, particularly the one on Victory Blvd that your office is aware of?  

Multiple local politicians are opposing these sites, including the one on Victory Blvd, through a variety of measures, both regulatory and legal.

Assemblyman Sam Pirozzolo has successfully spearheaded opposition to this project, writing a letter that was co-signed by State Sen. Andrew Lanza, Assemblyman Mike Reilly and Councilmember David Carr. It urged the Public Service Commission (PSC) to deny Victory Blvd. project developer Hecate an extension after they missed the deadline to file a legally required decommissioning plan. The PSC granted the lawmakers’ request, denying Hecate the extension. As a result, the company must now present their request directly to the PSC.

On a more general level, Assemblyman Michael Tannousis has called for stricter safety regulations, including allowing greater community input, and requiring a minimum distance of 1000 feet between BESS sites and nearby homes and schools.

Are there lawsuits planned, is community pressure effective in this instance, or is there something else being done about these sites?  

Borough President Vito Fossella announced in April that he was filing a lawsuit to halt the proliferation of BESS sites on the island with attorneys Lou Gelormino and Mark Fonte, seeking an injunction against all such sites in Richmond County. The plaintiffs include 10 residents who live near several BESS facilities. This is the only lawsuit we are aware of to date.

The Energy Storage Program is overseen by a state agency, the New York State Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). While there have been examples in New York State where community pressure has proven successful in delaying or even cancelling these projects, as has been done in Carmel in Putnam County and Oyster Bay in Nassau County, the fact that Staten Island’s local government is the New York City Council complicates the ability of local leaders to curtail development.

Community input is likely the best way to voice opposition to these sites. The planning process for BESS facilities mandates that public hearings be held, and a decision be made by the local reviewing board, and notices for the hearing must be published in local newspapers and mailed to landowners within 200 ft of the intended site.

While it’s easy to miss the notice, speaking up at these planning meetings is the most effective way to have local concerns taken into consideration, rather than protesting after the fact.

###

02 Jan 2025
blog, Michael Mezzacappa, News Permalink

AI, ESG Amid Biggest Worries Keeping GCs Up At Night

January 2, 2025
Coffey Modica partner, Michael Mezzacappa, was quoted in Law360, highlighting rapidly rising legal costs driven by a growing number nuclear verdicts.
By Sue Reisinger | January 2, 2025

The year 2025 has arrived for general counsel like a scary movie featuring monster environmental, social and governance risks, new technology demons that threaten to rip apart data privacy and security, and overlords who demand the legal department defend the company and save the day

In other words, it’s a new year, and general counsel are expected to be ready for anything. Law360 Pulse recently talked with some legal leaders about what’s keeping general counsel up at night in 2025.

The Conference Board, a nonprofit group that provides business research and advice, recently listed several risky issues for which executives need to “future proof” their companies. The issues included diversity, equity and inclusion policies; taking a political stance in public; and dealing with climate change, especially related to disinformation and misinformation.

On diversity, for example, the board warned that in 2025, DEI leaders “should prepare for a potential escalation in anti-DEI rhetoric, accelerated backlash, and additional DEI-related legislative and policy changes.” It advised general counsel and other corporate leaders to ensure clear messaging to employees and stakeholders, conduct a comprehensive review of their DEI programs and strategies, and be ready to adjust.

A different key concern arose for Ashton Yarnall, a lawyer who directs program development for executive event planner Consero, when she recently networked with legal leaders at a Consero general counsel forum. She found that artificial intelligence is top of mind for them in 2025.

“General counsel are particularly focused on establishing robust frameworks for AI governance, ensuring compliance with emerging AI regulations, and strengthening cybersecurity measures across their organizations,” Yarnall said. “The intersection of these issues — managing AI development while protecting sensitive data and maintaining cybersecurity — represents a complex challenge that requires GCs to balance innovation with risk management and regulatory compliance.”
Another hot issue, Yarnall said, was how the general counsel position continues to evolve, combining legal advocacy with the role of business adviser.

Legal leaders are searching for how to “seamlessly integrate legal considerations into business strategy while maintaining their professional independence and ethical obligations,” she explained.

Individual general counsel who talked with Law360 Pulse often raised issues more particular to their own businesses. For instance, Brian Dunn, the top lawyer at CrashPlan, a cloud-based computer backup service, said general counsel should worry about new regulations governing technology.

Dunn cited the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act as a regulation “that could have significant implications” for U.S. financial institutions and data and digital service providers that serve EU customers or handle data linked to EU financial markets. The act establishes standards for managing and recovering from cyber incidents, system failures and operational disruptions.

“Failure to comply can result in fines, reputational damage, and loss of contracts with EU clients,” Dunn said. Fines can reach as high as 2% of a company’s annual global revenue, or more than $1 million for an individual within an organization.

Likewise, Klinton Miyao, general counsel at Human Interest Inc., focused on the issue closest to his business: retirement plan worries. Human Interest, based in San Francisco, provides full-service retirement plans like 401(k) plans to employers.

“Many of my fellow GCs, [chief legal officers] and small-to-medium-sized business owners are unaware of the compliance risk and cost center that their retirement plan presents to their organization,” Miyao said, citing new regulatory obligations and increased employee suits over excessive fees.

Michelle Reed, an outside counsel who often works with in-house legal teams, agreed with Yarnall, Dunn and others in seeing technology at the center of most general counsel’s nightmares. Reed, a Paul Hastings partner and co-chair of the data privacy and cybersecurity group, said their biggest worry lies in “the big game hunting data breaches that we have seen roll out in the last two years [featuring] threat actors sneaking in and pulling data out bit by bit, or those threat actors that are shutting down companies.”

Data breaches create “a huge stress for general counsel because there’s almost no way to prepare or prevent it,” she added.

One way legal teams can prepare, however, is to ensure “your incident response is top-notch and that you’re prepared because you have so many different rules now that govern cybersecurity and reporting requirements,” Reed said.

That means general counsel are often working to bring their companies back online safely while simultaneously figuring out how to respond to regulators, adding to the stress.

A second area of concern for legal leaders in 2025, Reed said, is the intersection of AI and privacy. “AI presents an incredible opportunity and companies are seizing on it,” she said, “but it also presents significant risks — privacy, cybersecurity, discrimination. When you plug in all of those risks, general counsel are struggling to figure out what is the proper governance.”

A third area worrying general counsel, according to Reed, is regulatory enforcement by state attorneys general, which she is seeing especially in the privacy and cybersecurity space.

In the past, she noted, big states like California and New York have been the most active enforcers. “But the landscape is changing significantly and very quickly,” Reed said. “Over the past year, we’ve seen Texas and Utah, for example, more than double the size of their enforcement staff at the attorney general level, focusing on privacy and cybersecurity. And we’ve seen a significant uptick in both investigations and enforcement.”

Reed predicted that more states will roll out such regulations in 2025 and companies should prepare to “face enforcement in a myriad of jurisdictions.”

Another outside counsel, Peter Lando, founding partner at Lando & Anastasi LLP in Boston, focuses on patent and related areas of the law. He said general counsel are concerned with keeping up with changing legislation and rules in administrative agencies.

For instance, Lando said, he met with clients in 2024 who were worried over the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed noncompete ban. The FTC backed off the ban, “but it’s certainly emboldened many states to put their own versions in place” for 2025, he said.

Arash Behravesh, a Lando client, is senior intellectual property counsel at Agilent Technologies, which is based in Santa Clara, California. Behravesh, who works remotely from Washington, D.C., spoke from his personal viewpoint and not on behalf of Agilent.

He said his first area of concern for 2025 — “and I think this is general for all corporations” — is budget restraints and the need for reduced spending.” This is especially true, he said, when trying to balance IP protection with cost pressures to reduce spending.

The next biggest in-house challenge at all companies, Behravesh said, is balancing a growing legal workload with limited resources.

“Most companies are trying to cut costs, and the easiest way to do that is to not hire [or replace] employees, which means more work for everybody else,” he explained.

A third area of concern for Behravesh involves mergers and acquisitions. “We try to acquire on average at least one growing company per year,” he said. “So one of the things that keeps me up at night is due diligence,” especially pertaining to troublesome IP portfolios that could end up in litigation.

And no general counsel nightmare story would be complete without a mention of rising legal fees. Axiom CEO David McVeigh recently said in a statement accompanying a research report on budgeting, “Beyond the research, clients consistently tell me they are at the end of their rope on law firm costs and annual rate increases.”

Michael P. Mezzacappa, now a partner and general counsel at insurance defense firm Coffey Modica LLP in Tarrytown, New York, has his own take on the problem. Previously he served five years as a named in-house counsel at Frontier Insurance Co. while working at the law firm Slevin Sold Neubardt Weissman Faillace Samberg & Mezzacappa.

“Corporations are always concerned with legal fees, right?” Mezzacappa asked. Unlike most general counsel, however, who tend to blame law firms for raising their rates every year, he blames the plaintiffs bar and higher verdict awards, especially against wealthy corporations.

“And to go to trial is just much more costly than it was 10 years ago,” he said. “I’m talking about exponentially more costly.”

Mezzacappa rages about plaintiffs attorneys who support unnecessary surgeries and extend workers’ compensation cases beyond what’s fair, along with judges with crowded dockets who rush cases and juries too eager to sock it to corporations, especially insurance companies.

“The plaintiffs bar is getting increasingly richer because the verdict values have gone up exponentially,” he said. “So that’s the biggest concern in my general counsel, defense attorney world.”

###

03 Oct 2024
Michael Mezzacappa, News Permalink

Uber win on lawsuit motion highlights major role of binding arbitration

October 3, 2024
Coffey Modica partner, Michael Mezzacappa, was quoted in Legal Drive, offering insight on arbitration.
Justin Bachman, Senior Reporter | October 3, 2024

Dive Brief:

  • A couple who suffered severe injuries riding with an Uber driver must take their complaint against the company to arbitration, having agreed to waive their jury trial right, a New Jersey appeals court ruled last month in a case that has drawn national media headlines. Binding arbitration clauses are common across countless consumer user and employment agreements governing products from mobile phones to tax-preparation software to cable TV service.
  • Georgia and John McGinty said their minor daughter had agreed to Uber’s “terms of use” in January 2022 while placing an Uber Eats order with her parents’ permission. Two months later, the couple were injured when their Uber driver failed to stop for a red light, according to the ruling. Uber says it has only one user agreement and that Georgia McGinty had agreed to its terms three separate times since her first use of the rideshare app in 2015.
  • “Despite assertions to the contrary, the court concluded that the plaintiff herself — not her teenage daughter — agreed to Uber’s Terms of Use, including the arbitration agreement, on multiple occasions,” Uber Technologies said Thursday in a statement. The company said its arbitration motion does not affect the plaintiffs’ claim against the driver, Jia Zheng, for whom Uber has a state-mandated $1.5 million auto liability policy, or “50 times more coverage than a typical driver is required to carry.”

Dive Insight:

Binding arbitration clauses have increased significantly in corporate user agreements and employment offer letters as companies seek to resolve disputes in a forum that offers less legal expense and quicker resolutions. Arbitration also helps defendants avoid class actions and the kind of nuclear verdicts jury trials can present.

The American Arbitration Association said in its annual report that it had more than 500,000 cases filed last year for the first time since the organization’s founding in 1926.

On Sept. 20, a three-judge panel of the New Jersey appeals court reversed a Superior Court ruling last year denying Uber’s motion to compel arbitration of the McGintys’ complaint.

The court found that Uber’s arbitration provision “clearly and unambiguously evidences a waiver of plaintiffs’ right to pursue any claims against Uber in a court of law and obligates plaintiffs to resolve their claims through binding arbitration.”

A person using Uber’s platform for a ride or restaurant delivery must agree to the user terms before they can proceed to a particular service. They must also be 18.

The couple intends to file a motion for reconsideration at the appeals court by Oct. 11, and, if the court declines, would then appeal to the New Jersey Supreme Court, one of their attorneys, Evan Lide of Stark & Stark PC, told Legal Dive Thursday in an email.

“This is not only about my clients’ plight, but this decision has a negative effect on millions of other consumers as well,” he wrote.

The Uber lawsuit is the second compelled arbitration case in three months to draw national media headlines.

In August, Walt Disney Parks and Resorts abandoned its motion to compel arbitration of a complaint filed by the husband of a New York doctor who died in October 2023 after she suffered an acute allergic reaction to nuts and dairy from a restaurant on a Disney property near Orlando, Florida.

Disney argued that the woman’s husband, Jeffrey Piccolo, had agreed in 2019 to arbitrate any disputes when he signed up for a Disney+ streaming video account. The company later dropped its motion, agreeing to let the case proceed in a court.

Walt Disney did not respond to a message from Legal Dive seeking comment on that litigation.

The company “strive(s) to put humanity above all other considerations,” Disney Experiences Chairman Josh D’Amaro said in an Aug. 20 statement to Ars Technica. “With such unique circumstances as the ones in this case, we believe this situation warrants a sensitive approach to expedite a resolution for the family who have experienced such a painful loss.”

In response to forced arbitration, many trial lawyers have filed arbitration demands in bulk, by the tens of thousands, hoping to provoke a defendant to settle, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Mayer Brown attorneys argued in a 2023 white paper. Defendants typically bear the fee burden for arbitration proceedings.

When a firm files as many as 100,000 demands “does it really intend to resolve those claims on the merits?” attorneys Archis Parasharami, Andrew Pincus and Kevin Ranlett wrote. “Or is the goal to use the costs of instituting an arbitration — which are disproportionately borne by companies when consumers or employees initiate arbitration — to coerce a settlement without regard to the merits of the underlying claim?”

Corporations rely heavily on arbitration as a way to obtain “fair and reasonable” outcomes, said Michael Mezzacappa, a partner with Coffey Modica LLP.  Courts have become overly burdened, with litigation taking as much as five years in many states, he said.

“The jury verdicts the last 10 and 20 years are going nuclear,” said Mezzacappa, whose defense practice focuses on insurance cases. “An arbitrator is not going to sit there and give billions of dollars to somebody. Jurors are freely giving money away and it’s a problem for all of us.”

Consumers should also focus more attention on the agreements that they’re asked to sign in the course of their everyday lives, he said. “I think that society over time has learned to sign things without reading them.”

Georgia McGinty, an attorney who practices family law, believes that “consumers need to be protected,” Lide said.

“I am hopeful that the New Jersey Supreme Court is going to continue to protect the rights of consumers, but if we are unable to overturn the appellate decision, I think we need to look to a legislative fix,” he wrote. “Although the legislative fix may be too late for the McGintys, we want to do whatever we can to help other consumers in similar situations.”

10 Aug 2024
E-bikes, Michael Mezzacappa, News Permalink

Readers sound off on Laura Kavanagh’s Legacy

August 10, 2024
Coffey Modica partner, Michael Mezzacappa, was published in the New York Daily News opinion section regarding retiring FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanaugh and her legacy of awareness and advocacy regarding the growing threat of e-bike battery fires.
New York Daily News | August 10, 2024

Continue her legacy 

Tarrytown, N.Y.: Former FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh’s relentless advocacy for lithium-ion battery safety was rightly celebrated in your Aug. 7 editorial  “Laura Kavanagh’s mission continues.” Shining a light on the scourge of e-bike battery fires has not only inspired swift action on the part of our representatives at all levels of government, but it’s saved lives in the process. According to reporting in July 2024, e-bike battery fires had led to only one fatality versus 13 at the same point in 2023, no doubt due to greater consumer awareness of what to do in case of these fires. But more must be done, as the number of fires, year over year, has remained pretty much the same even as fatalities and injuries decline. Congress must pass federal safety standards that will keep improper equipment off the market and ensure that manufacturers doing business in the U.S. are traceable and insured. 

31 Jul 2024
E-bikes, Michael Mezzacappa, News Permalink

Opinion: E-Bike Battery Fires Demand Sweeping Safety Reforms

July 31, 2024
Michael Mezzacappa, partner at Coffey Modica, wrote an insightful opinion on E-Bike Battery Fires featured in City Limits.
By Michael P. Mezzacappa | July 31, 2024

The rash of lithium-ion battery fires across the country has finally sparked Congressional action with the introduction of the Setting Consumer Standards for Lithium-Ion Batteries Act (H.R. 1797), requiring the Consumer Product Safety Commission to establish product safety standards for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries used in e-bikes and other micro-mobility devices.

Such legislation merely touches the surface of a larger enforcement problem. E-bikes are here to stay, and without a multipronged approach demanding action from the business community and individual stakeholders, along with local governments, no meaningful difference will be achieved.

Since the onset of COVID-19, when home deliveries to locked-down residents became an essential service, e-bikes have become ubiquitous in major cities like New York. The lithium-ion batteries that power the bikes have become the leading cause of fatal fires throughout the five boroughs.

According to New York’s Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanaugh, in just the past two years, e-bike batteries have caused approximately 500 fires and killed 24 people, and there are no signs of this trend slowing down. H.R. 1797’s main sponsor is New York Congressman Ritchie Torres of the Bronx, which experienced three e-bike fires in the first half of May 2024 alone.

But the dangers of lithium-ion batteries are hardly an “only-in-New York” issue. Municipalities from coast to coast have seen a surge in incidents where exploding batteries suddenly go ablaze and trap those inside the affected home or business.

In California, San Francisco saw 58 fires involving lithium-ion batteries in 2022, with an additional 41 fires counted in 2023. Meanwhile, the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department reported at least 32 e-bike battery fires since mid-March 2024, in addition to 104 fires in 2023.

Data from the International Fire Chiefs Association found more than 60 battery fires in Houston, TX during 2023, and 73 lithium-ion battery fires were investigated by the Phoenix Fire Investigations Task Force between June 2023 and February 2024.

Even the DMV—the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia—is not immune, with 17 fires reported in Fairfax County in 2023, and eight Washington D.C. fires in the same year.

This ever-growing scourge has led to a patchwork of rules and regulations as cities and states tackle the problem with their own array of legislation, fire code changes and more. There is certainly an appetite for action on the federal level, as H.R. 1797 easily passed the House with bipartisan support. At a recent event in Brooklyn, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand voiced her support for the federal safety standards outlined in the bill and pushed for its inclusion in the Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

While developing and enforcing safety standards for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries can aid the fight against the fires they spark, it is far from enough to solve the issue. More actions need to be considered to fully put these deadly blazes behind us.

E-bikes are often used by delivery workers who are independent contractors living on an hourly salary. When battery issues arise, these price-conscious drivers frequently gravitate toward the cheapest possible option, whether that is a disreputable online seller or a secondary market flooded with foreign-based goods.

While putting stringent safety standards on new e-bike batteries is helpful, lawmakers will not be able to go into people’s homes to confiscate older, unregulated e-bikes and batteries.

The fact is, however, that lithium-ion battery imports in the U.S. roughly doubled for the third consecutive year in 2022, according to S&P Global—a period when 60 to 70 percent of global e-bike production occurred in China.

Those majority-foreign-manufactured models currently dominate the market and will continue to be sold from person to person at garage sales or on sites such as Craigslist.

So, while legislators at the federal, state and city levels debate and design the structures of their own interventions, more needs to be done to spread responsibility to all involved.

Local municipalities should mandate the creation of an insurance market that can handle e-bikes. For those used for commercial purposes, the e-bikes in the delivery fleet should be periodically inspected by the public authorities that might license operators of these motorized devices.

Further measures must also be taken on the federal level, as any lithium-ion battery standards must ensure that manufacturers are traceable and insured, if they want to do business in the U.S.

When deadly fires do occur, high-level investigations should take place. Just as the The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is called in when a train derails, a ship crashes or when airplane parts fall out of the sky, there must be a body to oversee and investigate incidents involving e-bikes on a national basis, ensuring that whatever went wrong is not constantly recurring.

While Congress should be applauded for recognizing the importance of this issue and making attempts to tackle some of the root causes head on, it is going to take a concerted effort from all of us to put a lid on these growing fire hazards and save lives.

Michael P. Mezzacappa is a partner and general counsel with Coffey Modica LLP. Admitted to practice in New York, New Jersey and the District of Columbia, he is a trial attorney who has represented insurers, property owners and managing agents, manufacturers, construction companies, trucking companies and other professionals in cases based on some of the largest and most high-profile litigations, including fires and explosions.

03 Apr 2024
Michael Mezzacappa, News Permalink

Op-ed: Latest version of Grieving Families Act on a path to nowhere

April 3, 2024

Coffey Modica’s Michael P. Mezzacappa unpacks the latest version of New York’s Grieving Families Act in this sobering Syracuse Post Standard op-ed:

By Michael P. Mezzacappa | April 3, 2024

The third version of a bill aimed at expanding New York’s compensable damages awarded to bereaved family members was rushed back into the New York state Legislature on Feb. 21.

While the bill has seemingly good intentions, this latest iteration does not take into account any of the good-faith concerns from stakeholders — the same lack of compromise that led Gov. Kathy Hochul to veto its previous version just over a month earlier on Dec. 29, 2023.

With no meaningful updates or changes, this latest rendering of the long-sought Grieving Families Act looks set to fail yet again.

The legislation’s botched execution will likely deal another blow to families seeking damages for grief and anguish caused by a loved one’s death. Strike three is a real disservice to anyone looking for New York to make progress on this issue, since good-faith negotiation and compromise might have yielded the governor’s stamp of approval.

New York is one of only two states that does not compensate for emotional loss in wrongful death lawsuits. Advocates for the Grieving Families Act have legitimate cause to change that, since everyone deserves a comprehensive sense of justice and closure following the death of a loved one.

Instead of seeking reasonable reform of New York’s wrongful death statute, however, they are attempting to completely overhaul the entire system of wrongful death jurisprudence in our state. This could adversely impact nearly all New Yorkers by raising insurance premiums and jacking up costs for a healthcare system that is already unaffordable for so many.

There must be a balance between adequately compensating families and ensuring the sustainability of insurance markets.

Under current law, a deceased person’s potential future income, in addition to medical bills and funeral costs, largely determines the amount family members can recoup in a successful lawsuit. This is already an incredibly convoluted calculation to make in the courtroom, one that largely falls on juries who are often ill-equipped to render such financially complex determinations.

New York pays out more for liability claims than any other state in the country, since it is one of the few states that does not put a cap on the amount of damages that plaintiffs can receive in wrongful death cases. The Grieving Families Act could expand these payments exponentially, saddling payment calculations with the subjective factor of emotional loss.

That alone might be doable, except that this bill would expand the traditional definition of “surviving close family members” to include siblings, parents, grandparents, stepchildren, step-grandchildren, step-grandparents, and any other person standing in loco parentis to the decedent.

Moreover, the proposed legislation would apply retroactively to the arbitrary date of July 1, 2018, regardless of when the lawsuit is filed. This would drastically increase the number of wrongful death claims and filings rushed into courthouses across the state, placing a tremendous burden on a court system already backlogged by existing litigation delayed by the pandemic, not to mention the swell of wrongful death cases resulting from Covid-19. Pending cases would have to be reevaluated to ensure that appropriate reserves are maintained, even though insurers set reserves for those cases long ago.

It all amounts to the kind of pie-in-the-sky thinking that fails to consider downstream consequences. Who’s going to pay for these changes?

This version of the Grieving Families Act could encourage frivolous lawsuits and increase the amount of discovery needed to defend such cases, in addition to raising the attendant legal defense costs, settlement dollars and administration all of this will require.

More significantly, it could result in skyrocketing liability insurance costs. An actuarial analysis by the New York Civil Justice Institute found that if the bill is enacted, insurance liability premiums could increase by $2.2 billion annually. Auto and general liability premiums are projected to increase by 11% as a direct result of this legislation, while medical liability premiums could increase up to 45%.

Driving up the cost of liability insurance sends our already short-staffed physicians to practice in other states. That could mean increased wait times for patients to see their doctors and an overall decline in the quality of our healthcare system.

We might even see a pullback of insurance companies tied to certain healthcare facilities in our state. Much like what’s happened in natural disaster-prone areas of the country, where wildfires, hurricanes and floods have forced insurance companies to jack up rates, restrict coverage or pull out of certain areas altogether, health insurance companies may come to view New York as prohibitively expensive. That, in turn, could narrow consumers’ choices and send healthcare costs soaring.

The Grieving Families Act, while noble in spirit, proposes too much all at once. Change happens incrementally. You cannot completely overhaul a system with this many moving parts overnight.

By failing to seriously consider its potential impacts, and by rushing the bill back into the legislature without further compromise, advocates for this measure are sticking to a doomed path that will keep grieving families in limbo for the foreseeable future.

28 Mar 2024
Karl MacGibbon, Michael Mezzacappa, News Permalink

Uber driver lucky to be alive after late passenger, cops stop her from crossing Baltimore bridge

March 28, 2024

Coffey Modica’s Michael Mezzacappa and Karl MacGibbon share more insights on the Francis Scott Key bridge collapse with the New York Post

By Melissa Koenig
March 28, 2024

A Baltimore Uber driver says she is lucky to be alive after a quick-thinking cop stopped her from crossing the Francis Scott Key Bridge early Tuesday morning.

Gayle Fairman got a call at 1:16 a.m. to pick up a passenger from the Amazon facility in Sparrows Point and drop them off in the Brooklyn neighborhood of the Maryland city — just across the bridge, she told WBAL.

But it took a few minutes for the passenger to come out to the car, which Fairman now says may have saved their lives.

“In all honesty, if my passenger wasn’t a little late coming out to my car and getting in, we probably very well would have been on the bridge when it collapsed,” she said.

Fairman described how she was “right at the front of the line” to cross the bridge spanning the Patapsco River at around 1:30 a.m. when she was stopped by a police officer.

26 Mar 2024
Karl MacGibbon, Michael Mezzacappa, News Permalink

Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse blocks $80B in cargo from moving through port: ‘Major disaster’

March 26, 2024

Our own Michael P. Mezzacappa and Karl MacGibbon share their insights on the economic impact

By Ronny Reyes, March 26, 2024

The collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge is a “major disaster” that threatens to disrupt the $80 billion in cargo that travels to and from one of America’s busiest ports, experts said.

The Port of Baltimore stands as the nation’s leading import and export site for cars, light trucks, sugar and gypsum — with a record 52.3 million tons of foreign cargo transported in 2023.

The bustling port, however, has been rendered inaccessible to shipping vessels following the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge overnight, with shipping expert Lars Jensen, CEO of Vespucci Maritime, warning of the economic impacts after officials offered no clear timeline on when the port will reopen.

“This is a major disaster and will create significant problems on the US East Coast for US importers and exporters,” Jensen wrote on LinkedIn.

“The bridge collapse will mean that for the time being it will not be possible to get to the container terminals — or a range of the other port terminals — in Baltimore.

“Additionally this means the cargo already gated into the Baltimore terminals would have to either wait an unknown period for the sealane to reopen, or be gated back out and shifted to a different port,” he added.

Paul Wiedefeld, Maryland’s secretary of transportation, told reporters Tuesday that vessel traffic in and out of the Port of Baltimore would be suspended until further notice, but noted that the port is still open to trucks.

Attorney Michael Mezzacappa, an expert on property damage cases in the shipping industry, told The Post that the collapse will have a major impact on shipping and traffic routes on the East Coast for the foreseeable future.

“It’s not going to get fixed anytime soon,” Mezzacappa said of the bridge, which allowed about 34,000 vehicles to get across the Patapsco River every day.

“It’s going to take a lot longer than anyone expects,” he added. “This is going to be a major problem for the northeast.”

Karl MacGibbon, the director of Quality Assurance and Control at Coffey Modica and another expert on shipping cargo damage, told The Post that it could be at least 4 months before the port can reopen, with ports in the New York area likely to pick up some of the shipments.

“We’ll have to see what happens and where the shipments can be diverted as New Jersey and New York’s ports are already busy to begin with,” MacGibbon said.

Gov. Wes Moore said the reconstruction of the Key Bridge will likely be a “long-term build,” without offering any specifics.

“It’s going to be a build that’s going to require every facet and every aspect of our society. It is something that I can tell you we are going to get this done,” Moore said.

President Biden offered proof of how important the port is to the economy. He vowed to “move heaven and Earth” to help repair the bridge and help those employed at the Port of Baltimore.

“We’re going to do everything we can to protect those jobs and help those workers,” the president said.

The port area also supports the cruise industry, with Carnival, Norwegian and Royal Caribbean carrying about 440,000 passengers on trips across the Patapsco River last year, according to the Baltimore Banner.

Royal Caribbean said in a statement that it was closely monitoring the situation in Baltimore and “working on alternatives for Vision of the Seas’ ongoing and upcoming sailings.”

The Port of Baltimore also generates more than 15,300 jobs, with another 140,000 jobs linked to the activity at the port.

Scott Cowan, president of the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 333 in the Port of Baltimore, warned that the bridge’s collapse will likely have a “catastrophic” impact for those employed there.

“Until the shipping channel gets opened, there’s not gonna be any ship traffic, there’s not gonna be any ships, there’s not gonna be any work for the people,” Cowan told the Baltimore Sun.

Read the full article in the New York Post.