What changed in April 2025 is what happens after the bite. A driver in New York now has access to the same dual framework that workers in most of the country have had for decades.
On April 17, 2025, the New York Court of Appeals issued a unanimous decision in Flanders v. Goodfellow that reshaped the state’s dog bite law for the first time in nearly two decades. The plaintiff was not a homeowner, a child, or a passerby. She was Rebecca Flanders, a United States Postal Service letter carrier, bitten on the shoulder while delivering a package. Her injuries required multiple surgeries and left permanent scarring, and the lower courts had thrown out her case under a 2006 precedent that barred negligence claims against dog owners. The Court of Appeals reversed, reinstated her claim, and overruled the precedent altogether.
The facts of the case are not unusual. The legal posture is. The occupational risk to delivery workers has been documented for decades, driven by routes that send carriers through dozens of unfamiliar properties a day, often without any way to know which homes contain unrestrained dogs. The U.S. Postal Service recorded more than 6,000 dog attacks on its employees in 2024, up from roughly 5,800 the year before, according to the USPS 2024 dog attack rankings published in May 2025. New York placed in the top ten states for the second consecutive year. Private carriers have seen the same trend: UPS reports an average of about 900 aggressive-dog incidents annually, and Amazon, FedEx, and gig delivery services have absorbed a rising share of the daily route exposure as e-commerce volume climbs.
The Legal Framework That Now Governs These Claims
For working drivers in New York, what changed in April 2025 matters more than the headline numbers. Before Flanders, an injured carrier had a single path to recovery against a dog owner: prove the owner knew or should have known the animal had vicious propensities. That standard, codified through a line of cases beginning with Bard v. Jahnke in 2006, made New York the only state in the country to bar ordinary negligence claims for harm caused by domestic animals. A driver bitten by a dog with no documented bite history could lose the case even when the owner left a gate open, ignored a leash law, or failed to restrain a known-aggressive animal during a delivery window.
Under the New York dog bite legal framework, injured workers can now pursue two parallel theories. Strict liability still applies when the owner had actual or constructive knowledge of the dog’s vicious propensities, and the Court of Appeals clarified that propensity evidence is broader than a prior bite. Growling, snarling, lunging, or repeatedly slamming into a window at approaching strangers can establish the required notice. Negligence, meanwhile, is back on the table for the first time since 2006: a driver can now argue that the owner failed to exercise reasonable care under the circumstances, regardless of whether the dog had ever previously shown aggression.
For delivery workers, the negligence claim is the larger practical change. Most route-based attacks involve dogs the owner has no formal record of aggression for. The Flanders facts are typical: the Goodfellows’ dog had never bitten anyone before, but two postal workers swore in affidavits that the animal regularly snarled and bit at windows when carriers approached. Under the old rule, that evidence was often parsed away on summary judgment. After Flanders, it can support both theories at once, and the question of what the owner reasonably should have done becomes a jury question rather than a threshold barrier.
Why On-Duty Drivers Have Two Paths to Compensation
A dog bite that happens on a delivery route is simultaneously a workplace injury and a third-party tort. New York’s Workers’ Compensation Law treats it as the former: an employee bitten while performing job duties is entitled to no-fault medical coverage and partial wage replacement through the employer’s carrier, regardless of who was at fault. The system covers reasonable and necessary medical treatment without copays and replaces approximately two-thirds of average weekly wages, subject to a statutory maximum of $1,222.42 per week as of July 2025. It does not cover pain and suffering, loss of consortium, or full wage replacement above the cap.
That gap is what the third-party claim closes. Workers’ Compensation Law § 11 prevents an employee from suing the employer in tort, but it does not shield the dog’s owner, who is neither the employer nor a co-worker. A delivery driver bitten on a residential porch can collect workers’ compensation benefits and separately pursue the homeowner under both theories Flanders now permits. Pain and suffering, full wage loss, scarring and disfigurement, and any permanent impairment are all recoverable in the third-party action. In serious-injury cases, the third-party recovery is typically several times the value of the workers’ compensation benefits.
The two claims are connected by a workers’ compensation lien under § 29. Whatever the carrier paid out in medical and indemnity benefits is reimbursable from the third-party recovery, which is one of the reasons coordinated handling of both claims matters early. Settling the third-party case without accounting for the lien can leave a driver owing the carrier a portion of the recovery they thought they would keep. The lien also affects timing: workers’ compensation benefits begin almost immediately, while a personal injury suit can take a year or more to resolve, so most drivers run both tracks in parallel rather than choosing between them.
Independent contractors and most gig delivery workers sit outside this structure. Workers’ compensation generally does not cover them, which means their primary route to recovery is the personal injury claim against the dog owner directly, usually paid through homeowner or renter insurance. The reframing in Flanders makes that path materially stronger than it was a year ago, but it also means contractors who skip the immediate documentation steps lose leverage they cannot recover later.
What the Record Has to Show
Both tracks turn on what the driver can document. The evidence that drives dog bite claims tends to be assembled in the first hours and days after the attack rather than weeks later, and gaps in that record are routinely used by defense counsel to challenge causation, severity, or the owner’s knowledge. Medical treatment is the obvious anchor: emergency department records, photographs taken before and during recovery, follow-up appointments, and any reconstructive or psychological care all build the timeline that connects the bite to its long-term consequences.
Scene evidence is the other half. Whether a yard was fenced, whether a gate was latched, whether a leash law applied, whether a warning sign was posted, and whether the dog had access to the porch all bear on both the strict-liability and negligence theories. After Flanders, scene conditions matter even more in the negligence analysis, because the question shifts from “did the owner know the dog was dangerous” to “did the owner take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable harm.” A propped-open screen door or a known broken latch can carry the case where prior-bite evidence does not exist.
Witness statements from other carriers on the route are a category that Flanders specifically validated. The two postal workers who provided affidavits in that case had been delivering to the same address for years, and their descriptions of the dog’s window-lunging behavior were what allowed the Court of Appeals to conclude there was a triable issue on constructive knowledge. Drivers who experience near-miss incidents at addresses on their routes, even ones that do not result in a bite, increasingly have reason to report and document them through their employer or carrier system; that record can become evidence in someone else’s case later.
What the Route Looks Like From Here
The practical effect of Flanders for working drivers in New York is that recovery no longer turns on a defendant’s prior knowledge in the way it did. Defense counsel and homeowner insurers are recalibrating their exposure accordingly. According to the New York State Bar Association’s analysis of the decision, the ruling brings the state in line with the thirty-six other jurisdictions that already allowed parallel negligence claims, and it broadens the universe of cases in which an injured worker can credibly demand more than medical-only compensation. Insurers are expected to tighten breed exclusions, raise premiums in higher-risk policies, and push for earlier settlement in cases that previously would have been disposed of on summary judgment.
For the carriers themselves, the underlying problem on the route has not changed. Dogs are still territorial, deliveries still arrive at predictable times, and the volume of e-commerce shipments still grows year over year. What changed in April 2025 is what happens after the bite. A driver in New York now has access to the same dual framework that workers in most of the country have had for decades, and the workers’ compensation system still provides immediate medical coverage on top of it. Used together, the two tracks are designed to cover what a single one cannot, and the difference between full and partial recovery often comes down to whether the driver knew both options were available before signing anything from an insurer.
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