A unanimous panel of the Appellate Division, First Department, has suspended two Bronx attorneys who admitted they encouraged a client to lie about a personal injury case. The lawyers, Shane Rios and Daniel Levy, met when they were students at Fordham University School of Law and started personal injury firm Rios & Levy in 2008. Both had worked for other personal injury firms before.
One of their first clients was a woman who said she had tripped on a cracked sidewalk in front of a Yonkers church. When the two attorneys went to look at the site, they saw no problem with the walk in front of the church, but noticed a badly cracked sidewalk in front of the house across the street. When they met with the woman again, before asking her to describe the accident, they explained to her that she would have a viable claim only if she fell across the street from the church. She told them that she had.
