On July 30, 2026, the First Department issued a decision in 217 Trust v. VIR Constr., Inc., 2026 NY Slip Op. 04824, holding that an amended complaint related back even though not all the facts alleged in it were in the original complaint, explaining:
While an application to amend a pleading pursuant to CPLR 3025 lies within the court’s sound discretion, there is no sound basis in law to grant amendment pursuant to CPLR 3025(c) to add an untimely claim. Thus, a pleading cannot be amended to assert a new claim for which the statute of limitations has expired unless the assertion of the new claim is deemed to relate back to an earlier operative pleading that was filed while the new claim still would have been timely. Whether a new claim relates back to the time of the filing of the earlier pleading is governed by CPLR 203(f), which provides:
“A claim asserted in an amended pleading is deemed to have been interposed at the time the claims in the original pleading were interposed, unless the original pleading does not give notice of the transactions, occurrences, or series of transactions or occurrences, to be proved pursuant to the amended pleading.”
In determining whether the original pleading provides the requisite notice of the transactions or occurrences underlying the proposed new claim, a court should not look beyond the four corners of the original pleading.
Consistent with its recognition that the primary purpose of a limitations period is fairness to a defendant, the Court of Appeals has called the factor of notice to the defendant within the applicable limitations period the linchpin of the relation back doctrine. Under this standard, Great Northern’s subrogation claim, on its face, should be deemed to relate back to the filing of the earlier complaints. The proposed FAC alleges that Great Northern, pursuant to its policy covering the building, made a payment to the 217 plaintiffs for a portion of the property damage allegedly caused by defendants’ negligence in managing the renovation project. The earlier complaints all contain substantially the same allegations of defendants’ mismanagement of the project as does the proposed FAC. Indeed, had Great Northern not reimbursed the 217 plaintiffs for the damage from the leak that occurred on January 31, 2019, the damage from that leak would have been at issue as a claim of the 217 plaintiffs themselves, inasmuch as the 217 plaintiffs allege that the leak was a result of defendants’ mismanagement of the project. Stated otherwise, the transactions, occurrences, or series of transactions or occurrences referenced in CPLR 203(f), and to be proved in support of the subrogation claim interposed in the proposed FAC — defendants’ management of the renovation project — are precisely the same transactions, occurrences, or series of transactions or occurrences alleged in the earlier complaints. As plaintiffs point out, the only effect of the assertion of the subrogation claim is to shift the claim for a portion of the damages allegedly caused by defendants’ alleged wrongdoing from the 217 plaintiffs to Great Northern, their insurer.
In fact, this Court has previously held that a subrogation claim by an uninsured motorist carrier for part of whatever plaintiffs might recover in a personal injury action arises out of the same occurrence that gave rise to plaintiffs’ claim and is similar enough to plaintiffs’ claim that defendant was thereby placed on notice of the insurer’s claim by the original complaint. This being the case, we concluded in McHale that the subrogation claim, for which an amendment of the complaint was sought, related back to the filing of the original complaint under CPLR 203(f) and, therefore, was not time-barred. The same result has been reached by the Second Department.
In medical insurance contexts, the Fourth Department has reached conclusions similar to those reached in McHale and Steward.
It appears that the question of the applicability of the relation-back doctrine to a subrogation claim asserted by an insurer of the original plaintiff has not yet been directly posed to the Court of Appeals. Nonetheless, the Court of Appeals has signaled its approval of the view that CPLR 203(f) applies in this context. In Fasso v Doerr (12 NY3d 80 [2009]), the Court determined that an insurer’s subrogation rights cannot be cut off by a settlement between the injured party and the tortfeasor to which the insurer did not consent. In setting forth the facts of that case, Judge Graffeo observed that the injured party’s health insurer (IHA) had moved to intervene in its insured’s malpractice action, rather than bringing its own direct subrogation action against the tortfeasor, because
“by the time it became involved in this case, the statute of limitations had run. . . . IHA decided to request intervention on the basis that an ‘intervenor’s claim will be deemed to have been interposed as of the filing date of the petition . . . if the proposed intervenor’s claim and that of the original petitioner are based on the same transaction or occurrence’ and ‘the proposed intervenor and the original petitioner are so closely related that the original petitioner’s claim would have given the respondent notice of the proposed intervenor’s specific claim so that the imposition of the additional claim would not prejudice the respondent'”.
It is plain from the foregoing that the Court of Appeals in Fasso believed that an insurer’s claim as subrogee to recover from a tortfeasor expenditures that the insurer made to or on behalf of an insured who was injured by the tortfeasor meets the standard established in DeBuono for applying the relation-back doctrine of CPLR 203(f) to an otherwise time-barred claim by a new plaintiff.
In arguing that Great Northern’s subrogation claim should not be deemed to relate back to the filing of any of the earlier complaints, defendants argue (1) that none of the earlier complaints gave them notice of at least one essential element of the subrogation claim (specifically, Great Northern’s payment of the 217 plaintiffs’ claim under their policy); (2) that Great Northern’s failure to assert its subrogation claim before the expiration of the limitation period was a deliberate choice and not a mistake; and (3) that the amendment of the complaint to assert the subrogation claim will unfairly prejudice defendants. We address each of these objections in turn.
As previously noted, whether the defendant received notice of the relevant transactions or occurrences from a prior pleading before the expiration of the statute of limitations is indeed the touchstone of the relation-back inquiry under CPLR 203(f). Tellingly, defendants do not deny that the prior complaints put them on notice of the transactions and occurrences giving rise to the claim to which Great Northern became subrogated — namely, defendants’ management of the renovation project, which allegedly resulted in defective work, delays and increased costs. Rather, defendants rely on the fact that the earlier complaints contained no reference to Great Northern’s payment of the 217 plaintiffs’ claim under their policy. We are not persuaded.
This Court has held that defendants need not have been put on notice of every factual allegation on which the subsequent claims depend where the original complaint put them on notice of the occurrences that underlie those claims. For example, in O’Halloran, the plaintiff brought an action against her employer for gender and disability discrimination and retaliation, and then, after the expiration of the relevant statute of limitations, sought to amend her complaint to include a claim of discrimination based on sexual orientation. Although the original complaint did not refer to the plaintiff’s sexual orientation or to the defendants’ awareness of that orientation (which were essential elements of the new claim), we held that it sufficed that the original complaint had put the defendants on notice of the underlying employment actions taken against the plaintiff, which were the occurrences on which both the plaintiff’s old and new claims were based. Here, too, the earlier complaints put defendants on notice of what the claims of both the 217 plaintiffs and Great Northern were really about. The few facts added in the proposed FAC to support the subrogation claim — the existence of the insurance policy, the claim made thereunder, and Great Northern’s payment on that claim — are cut and dried and unlikely to be the source of much contention in the litigation.
Defendants’ next argument is that Great Northern failed to establish that its failure to attempt to have its subrogation claim added to the case before the expiration of the statute of limitations on January 31, 2022 (three years after the date of the radiator leak) was a mistake or inadvertent oversight. This argument assumes that the three-part test used in determining whether to apply the relation-back doctrine to an amended pleading adding a new defendant — one of the prongs of which is the requirement that the delay be due to a mistake rather than part of a calculated strategy (see Nemeth, 40 NY3d at 407-408; Buran, 87 NY2d at 178) — applies where, as here, the proposed amendment does not seek to add a new defendant to the case. However, this Court held otherwise in O’Halloran, where, citing Buran and Duffy, we noted that “[t]he Court of Appeals has recognized that a more relaxed standard applies where a plaintiff seeks to use the relation-back doctrine by adding a new claim against a defendant who is already a party to litigation as opposed to adding a new defendant” (O’Halloran, 154 AD3d at 86). In O’Halloran, we stated further:
Thus, although the Court of Appeals has adopted a three-part test for determining whether to apply relation back to an amended pleading that adds a new defendant, no such test applies where a plaintiff simply seeks the relation back of a new claim. In other words, where, as here, a proposed amended complaint contains an untimely claim against a defendant who is already a party to the litigation, the relevant considerations are simply (1) whether the original complaint gave the defendant notice of the transactions or occurrences at issue and (2) whether there would be undue prejudice to the defendant if the amendment and relation back are permitted.
In any event, even if the mistake element applied here, the showing required is minimal; all that is required is a simple oversight or a mistake of law. On this record, we cannot say that the delay in asserting the subrogation claim was not based on oversight or mistake of law — the latter perhaps based on plaintiffs’ counsel’s apparent misapprehension that a claim based on the leak of January 31, 2019, was already time-barred on February 14, 2020, apparently because he was measuring the time from February 14, 2017 (see footnote 4 above and accompanying text). Moreover, the present record does not disclose when Great Northern made the payment on the 217 plaintiffs’ claim. If the payment was not made until after the statute of limitations expired on January 31, 2022, Great Northern could not have been made a party to the action before the expiration of the limitation period because it would not yet have become subrogated to the claim. Moreover, it is difficult to see how Great Northern could have realized any tactical advantage by delaying the assertion of the subrogation claim once it had made the payment.
Finally, we reject defendants’ argument that the relation-back doctrine should not be applied here because permitting Great Northern to assert its subrogation claim would unduly prejudice defendants by subjecting them to potentially greater liability. Initially, as defendants concede, this Court has never treated the potential for additional liability as conclusively demonstrating undue prejudice for relation-back purposes. That this Court has permitted an amendment to assert an otherwise untimely derivative claim also shows that an increase in exposure to potential liability does not constitute undue prejudice for these purposes. As we said in Giambrone, to find prejudice, there must be some indication that the defendant has been hindered in the preparation of his case or has been prevented from taking some measure in support of his position. Indeed, the Court of Appeals, in allowing the amendment of the complaint in a medical malpractice case to add an otherwise untimely wrongful death claim, arguably held half a century ago that increased potential liability does not constitute the kind of prejudice that will defeat application of the relation-back doctrine. As with their notice argument, defendants’ prejudice argument collapses when one considers that the claim for damages based on the January 31, 2019 radiator leak would plainly be part of the case if it were not covered by insurance and were being asserted by the 217 plaintiffs themselves, rather than by their insurer. That the insurer has paid the claim and now asserts the claim as the subrogee of the 217 plaintiffs should not lead to a different result.
(Internal quotations and citations omitted).