Ask around long enough on Myrtle Avenue and a pattern emerges. Someone's cousin was hit by a delivery truck and didn't think they had a case. A neighbor slipped on an icy stoop that the landlord had ignored for weeks and assumed nothing could be done about it. A coworker left a hospital in worse shape than they arrived and was told by three different people that suing a doctor was basically impossible. In each of those stories, at some point, a name comes up. Daniella Levi. The founding attorney of Daniella Levi and Associates, P.C. did not build her reputation in Brooklyn through advertising. She built it through outcomes — through a practice defined by the conviction that injured people deserve the same quality of legal firepower that the other side brings to the table, and that the pursuit of justice does not stop because a case is difficult, a defendant is large, or a client came in unsure whether they had a right to be there at all. They do. And Levi will tell them so in the first five minutes.
The firm handles the cases that matter most to working people in Brooklyn: motor vehicle accidents, collisions involving 18-wheelers and commercial trucks, slip and fall injuries, medical malpractice claims, and NYPD misconduct. The team is built around a single standard — the highest possible recovery for every client — and every attorney and legal professional at the firm operates according to it. Consultations are free. The firm works on contingency. And the representation, once retained, is anything but passive.
What follows is a frank look at how Levi thinks about personal injury law, what she has learned from years of practicing it in Brooklyn, and what anyone who has been hurt needs to understand before they take a single step in any direction.
The Version of Events You Are Not Being Told
Levi has a way of reframing the situation that most injured people find clarifying, even when it is uncomfortable. "By the time someone calls us," she says, "there is usually already a version of events being constructed — and it is not theirs."
This is the part of personal injury law that does not make it into the public conversation. The moment an accident occurs, the parties with the most to lose financially begin managing their exposure. A commercial trucking company's insurer may have a field investigator on the scene within hours. A property owner's legal team begins reviewing maintenance logs and looking for documentation that supports their defense before most injured people have even been discharged from the emergency room. An insurance adjuster makes a friendly phone call — genuinely friendly, often — with the specific professional goal of obtaining a statement, establishing a tone of reasonableness, and creating a record that will be used later to limit what the company pays.
None of this is illegal. All of it is standard practice. And it operates most effectively against people who do not know it is happening.
At Daniella Levi and Associates, the first job is to make the client aware of the landscape they are actually in — not the one they assumed they were in. The second job is to start building the counter-record immediately. That means preserving evidence before it disappears, identifying every party that may carry legal liability, and establishing a legal presence that signals to the other side that this claim will be pursued seriously and without shortcuts. "When the other side knows you are prepared to go the distance," Levi says, "the conversation about what this case is worth changes considerably."
In motor vehicle cases — including the 18-wheeler and commercial truck accidents that generate some of the most serious injuries the firm handles — that preparation involves a level of investigation that goes well beyond the police report. Trucking accidents in particular require pulling apart a liability picture that can involve the driver, the carrier, the freight broker, the loading crew, and the vehicle manufacturer simultaneously. Each of those parties has counsel. Each has an insurer. Each will advance the interpretation of events that minimizes their exposure. The firm's job is to hold all of them accountable to what the evidence actually shows.
Slip and fall cases on Myrtle Avenue and the surrounding blocks present their own set of challenges — and their own set of opportunities for clients who have the right representation. Brooklyn's mix of aging commercial storefronts, residential buildings with complex ownership arrangements, and stretches of public sidewalk maintained by the city creates a landscape where the question of who is legally responsible for a dangerous condition is frequently contested. Levi's approach is to answer that question before the other side gets to define it. "Property owners count on injured people not knowing who to sue," she says. "We make sure that calculation doesn't work."
Medical malpractice claims require a different kind of endurance. These are cases built on expert testimony, clinical record analysis, and the ability to demonstrate — precisely and persuasively — where a healthcare provider's conduct fell below the standard of care and what that failure cost the patient. They are among the most resource-intensive cases in civil litigation, and they are among the cases the firm takes on without hesitation when the facts support them.
Brooklyn Has a Specific Relationship With This Kind of Law — And Levi Understands It
Personal injury law is practiced everywhere, but it is not practiced the same way everywhere. Brooklyn has a legal culture, a court culture, and a community culture that shapes how these cases move — and an attorney who has spent years working within that specific environment brings knowledge that cannot be transferred from a different jurisdiction.
Myrtle Avenue runs through neighborhoods that are economically varied, densely populated, and defined by a street-level commerce and foot traffic that creates genuine daily hazard. The corridor sees a significant volume of delivery vehicles — a category of traffic that has expanded substantially with the growth of e-commerce — operating on tight schedules in conditions that are not always compatible with careful driving. For pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers who share that space, the consequences of a collision can be severe and life-altering. For the injured person trying to figure out what to do next, the complexity of commercial vehicle liability is one of the first obstacles they encounter.
Levi is also attentive to something that does not always surface in legal discussions but shapes the experience of her clients profoundly: the relationship between an injury and economic precarity. Brooklyn's workforce includes a large proportion of people who are self-employed, working gig or hourly jobs, or supporting families on incomes that leave no margin for disruption. When an injury removes someone from work — even temporarily — the financial pressure is immediate and compounding. Medical debt accumulates. Rent does not pause. And the legal process, which moves on its own timeline, can feel impossibly slow against that backdrop.
The firm's contingency structure addresses the financial barrier to entry. But Levi's awareness of that economic reality also shapes how she communicates with clients, how she prioritizes the elements of a case, and how she evaluates what a good outcome actually looks like for a specific person in a specific situation. A settlement figure that looks adequate in the abstract may be insufficient for someone whose injury has created cascading consequences in their life. That difference matters, and it is the kind of difference that only surfaces when an attorney is paying close enough attention.
What to Ask — and What the Answers Will Tell You
For anyone in Brooklyn who is in the process of deciding who to trust with a personal injury claim, Levi is direct about what the evaluation should look like — and what to listen for when attorneys answer.
Start with specificity. Ask whether the attorney has handled cases that are factually similar to yours — not just in the same general practice area, but in the same claim type, against similar defendants, in New York courts. The procedural landscape for a premises liability claim against a Brooklyn landlord is different from a medical malpractice claim against a hospital system, which is different again from a commercial vehicle accident on a Brooklyn street. Experience in one does not automatically translate to the others, and an attorney who cannot speak specifically to your type of case is signaling something important about the limits of what they can offer.
Ask about the firm's approach when a settlement offer comes in below what the case is worth. This question cuts through a lot of noise quickly. Firms that operate on volume — high caseloads, fast resolutions — tend to treat a settlement offer as a conclusion. Firms that are genuinely invested in each client's outcome treat it as a data point in an ongoing negotiation, and as a decision that belongs to the client, made with full information about what the alternatives look like. The answer to this question will tell you which kind of firm you are talking to.
Ask how long the attorney expects your type of case to take, and what the key decision points will be along the way. An attorney who can answer this with specificity — not just "it depends" but an actual account of how these cases typically move and where the pivots happen — is an attorney who has done this enough times to know the terrain. That knowledge is what you are paying for, even when you are paying nothing upfront.
more info
What Daniella Levi Wants You to Know Before You Decide Anything
Levi has one consistent piece of advice for anyone who has been injured and is still in the early stages of figuring out what to do: do not let the other side's timeline become your timeline.
Insurance companies move quickly because speed serves their interests. Adjusters call early because early contact, before a claimant has counsel, produces outcomes that favor the insurer. Evidence windows close on schedules that have nothing to do with how long it takes an injured person to feel ready to engage with the legal process. New York's notice requirements for claims against government entities — as short as 90 days in some cases — do not extend because someone was too hurt or too overwhelmed to act sooner.
The firm's free consultation exists precisely for this moment — not as a sales call, but as an honest assessment of where someone stands, what their options are, and what the cost of waiting looks like in their specific situation. Levi does not believe in telling people what they want to hear. She believes in telling them what they need to know so they can make a decision they will not regret.
For anyone on Myrtle Avenue or anywhere else in Brooklyn who has been hurt and is wondering whether the fight is worth having, the answer that Daniella Levi and Associates has built its entire practice around is the same one it has always been: it is. The consultation is free. The advice is priceless. And the only mistake is waiting too long to ask for it.