Losing someone because of another person's carelessness is a particular kind of grief, and a New Jersey wrongful death lawyer exists so that the legal side of it does not fall on the people who are grieving.
At Reinartz Law Firm in Hackensack, we represent families across Bergen County and the rest of the state after a fatal accident. Our role is to hold the responsible party accountable and to secure the resources your family will need going forward.
This is not about a payout, and it is never about getting even. It is about making sure the loss is answered for and that the people your loved one supported are not left carrying the cost of someone else's conduct alone.
When you are ready, call us at (201) 289-8614. There is no charge for the conversation, and there is no pressure to decide anything in it.
Table of contents
- Who Can Bring a Wrongful Death Claim in New Jersey?
- New Jersey Recognizes Two Separate Claims After a Death
- What Damages Does a New Jersey Wrongful Death Claim Cover?
- How Long Does a Family Have to File?
- What Kinds of Fatal Accident Cases Do We Take?
- What Makes Proving a Fatal Claim Different?
- Why Bergen County Families Trust Our NJ Wrongful Death Attorney With These Cases
- How We Handle a New Jersey Wrongful Death Case
- FAQs Answered by Our New Jersey Wrongful Death Lawyer
- Let Us Carry the Legal Side of This
Who Can Bring a Wrongful Death Claim in New Jersey?
In New Jersey, a wrongful death claim is brought by the personal representative of the estate, not by family members individually. That representative is the executor named in a will, or, when there is no will, someone appointed by the county surrogate as administrator ad prosequendum, which is simply the title New Jersey gives to a person authorized to pursue a death claim on the estate's behalf.
The recovery, however, does not go to the estate. Under N.J.S.A. 2A:31-4, wrongful death damages go to the people who depended on the person who died, following the state's intestacy order. A spouse and children come first, then parents, then siblings, and other dependent relatives.
One consequence of that structure often surprises families: a dependent left entirely out of a will can still share in a wrongful death recovery. The will governs the estate, not the death claim.
Sorting out the appointment is usually the first practical step, and it happens at the Bergen County Surrogate's Court on Main Street for families here.
Our wrongful death lawyers in NJ handle that paperwork so you are not standing in line at a courthouse in the same month you buried someone. If you are unsure who in your family has standing, the question of who has standing to bring a wrongful death claim in NJ depends on dependency rather than on the family tree alone.
New Jersey Recognizes Two Separate Claims After a Death
Most families are surprised to learn there are two claims, not one, and that they compensate different losses and go to different people. Both are usually filed together in a single lawsuit.
The Wrongful Death Act
The New Jersey Wrongful Death Act compensates the survivors for what they lost when the person died. It covers the financial support and the household services that person would have provided across the rest of their life.
The Survival Act
The Survival Act compensates for what your loved one endured between the injury and the death, including conscious pain and suffering, medical bills, and lost wages during that period. It also covers reasonable funeral and burial expenses. That recovery goes to the estate and is distributed according to the will or the intestacy rules.
The practical difference matters because survival damages can be reached by the estate's creditors while wrongful death damages generally cannot. Understanding the difference between a wrongful death claim and a survival action shapes how a case is structured from the beginning, and it is the sort of thing that is much easier to get right early than to fix later.
What Damages Does a New Jersey Wrongful Death Claim Cover?
New Jersey wrongful death damages center on the value of what the person would have provided, measured over the life they should have had. The categories include the following:
- Lost financial support, calculated from earnings, benefits, and reasonable expectations of future income.
- The value of household services, including childcare, caregiving, cooking, home maintenance, and household management.
- Lost guidance, advice, training, and companionship, which New Jersey treats as a genuine and compensable loss for children in particular.
- Medical expenses connected to the final injury.
- Reasonable funeral and burial costs.
New Jersey does not compensate the survivors' own grief or emotional suffering, which strikes most families as backwards, and we say so plainly rather than letting anyone find out at the end. What the law does compensate is the concrete absence of a person who held a family together.
Proving that absence takes real work. We build these claims with economists, vocational analysts, and often the family's own testimony about what a parent actually did in a week, because a spreadsheet does not capture a father who drove three children to practice every evening.
How Long Does a Family Have to File?
A New Jersey wrongful death action generally must be filed within two years of the date of death under N.J.S.A. 2A:31-2. There is a narrow exception when the death resulted from murder, aggravated manslaughter, or manslaughter, and the defendant was convicted or adjudicated, in which case the time limit does not apply.
The survival claim runs on a different clock. It follows the deadline that would have applied to your loved one's own injury claim, which means two years from the date of the injury rather than the date of death. When someone lingers for months before dying, those two dates can be far apart.
If a public entity was involved, a formal notice of claim is generally due within 90 days under the New Jersey Tort Claims Act. That is a short window in a season when almost nothing feels manageable.
None of this needs to be figured out by you. Call, and we will identify which deadlines apply and protect them.
What Kinds of Fatal Accident Cases Do We Take?
We handle fatal claims arising from the same conduct that underlies our injury practice, with motor vehicle crashes and workplace deaths making up the largest share.
Fatal crashes
Collisions involving trucks, motorcycles, pedestrians, and cyclists on corridors like Route 4, Route 17, and Interstate 80 are the cases we see most. Commercial vehicle cases in particular require moving quickly, because driver logs, telematics data, and maintenance records can be lost within weeks.
Work-related deaths
When someone dies on the job, dependents may be entitled to workers' compensation death benefits through the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development, and there may also be a separate claim against a third party who caused the death. Those two tracks interact, and running them together well is a large part of what we do. Because we handle both injury and compensation matters, a family does not have to hire two firms.
Catastrophic injuries that end in death
Some of these cases begin as severe injury claims and change character weeks or months later. Where a catastrophic injury results in wrongful death, the survival claim for the period of suffering before death becomes a substantial part of the case.
If you are not sure whether what happened to your family fits any of these, call anyway and describe it. Part of a first conversation is simply telling you whether there is a claim.
What Makes Proving a Fatal Claim Different?
The hardest part of a death case is that the person who could describe what happened is not there to describe it. Everything the insurer disputes has to be proven from other sources, and that changes how the case gets built.
Reconstructing the event without the witness
We rely on scene evidence, vehicle data, physical damage patterns, and accident reconstruction to establish what occurred. In a fatal crash, the event data recorder in a modern vehicle can show speed, braking, and steering input in the seconds before impact. That data is only useful if someone secures it before the vehicle is repaired or sold for salvage.
Causation as a separate fight
Establishing that the defendant was careless is often the easier half. Insurers commonly concede the conduct and then argue the death came from something else, such as an underlying health condition or a treatment decision made afterward. Answering that requires the medical examiner's findings, the full hospital record, and physicians who can explain the chain of events in terms a jury follows.
Documenting a life rather than an injury
In an injury case, the damages record is largely medical. In a death case, it is biographical, built from tax returns, employment history, and testimony about what a person actually did for the people around them. That work is slower and more personal, and we approach it at whatever pace a family can manage.
Each of these pieces takes time to assemble properly, and that is a large part of why fatal claims move more slowly than injury claims. It is also why the early weeks matter more than they seem to at the time.
Why Bergen County Families Trust Our NJ Wrongful Death Attorney With These Cases
We take a small number of these cases at a time, deliberately. A death claim is not a file to be processed, and families can tell the difference immediately.
- Richard Reinartz spent more than a decade as a trial lawyer at two large national firms defending claims before founding this practice, so he knows how the other side prepares to argue that a life was worth less than it was.
- You speak with your attorney, not a rotating cast of coordinators, and Richard does the day-to-day work of building the case himself.
- We handle the surrogate's court appointment, the estate paperwork, and the record collection, so your family is not managing legal logistics during a funeral.
- We are reachable around the clock, and the first consultation costs nothing.
- We work on contingency, which means no fee unless there is a recovery.
- We pursue New Jersey workers' compensation death benefits alongside the injury claim when both apply.
No lawyer can promise a result, and we will not. What we will do is tell you honestly what your family's claim looks like, what it will take, and how long it may run. Call (201) 289-8614 whenever you are ready to have that conversation.
How We Handle a New Jersey Wrongful Death Case
The first thing we do is take the urgent things off your list. That means the appointment paperwork, the records requests, and the calls from insurers who have already started building their file.
Then we move on evidence that will not wait. Vehicles get repaired, video gets overwritten, and witnesses move away, so preservation letters and scene work happen in the first weeks rather than the first year.
The valuation work runs in parallel and takes longer. We assemble the economic picture of what your loved one contributed, we work with the treating physicians and the medical examiner's findings on causation, and we develop the record on the period of suffering before death.
Throughout, you decide. Whether to settle and on what terms is always the family's choice, and our job is to make sure you understand the offer well enough for that choice to be a real one. You can read more about how a wrongful death lawsuit works in New Jersey if you want the longer version.
FAQs Answered by Our New Jersey Wrongful Death Lawyer
Below are the questions families most often ask us that were not already addressed above.
Can we bring a claim if the person responsible was also charged criminally?
Yes. A criminal prosecution and a civil death claim are separate proceedings with different burdens of proof, and one does not replace the other. A criminal case can even help the civil claim, though we sometimes coordinate timing so the two do not interfere.
What if my loved one was partly at fault?
New Jersey's comparative negligence rule still allows a recovery as long as your loved one's share of the fault was not greater than that of the parties being sued. The award is reduced by that percentage. Insurers frequently push this argument hard in fatal cases precisely because the person who could contradict them is gone, which is one reason independent investigation matters so much.
Do all the family members have to agree to file?
The claim is filed by one personal representative, so unanimous agreement is not required to move forward. Relatives with an equal right to serve are usually asked to sign renunciations at the surrogate's office. When families disagree about who should serve, we work through it as calmly as the situation allows.
How is the money divided among survivors?
A court apportions wrongful death damages among the dependents based on the degree of dependency each one had on the person who died. Survival damages pass through the estate instead. Where minor children are involved, their shares are typically protected by the court until they come of age.
Will we have to go to trial?
Most of these cases resolve without one, though we prepare every file as though a trial is coming because that preparation is what makes a fair resolution possible. If a trial becomes likely, we tell you well in advance and walk your family through exactly what to expect. Nobody is put on a witness stand unprepared.
Is a wrongful death recovery taxable?
Compensation for physical injury and death is generally not treated as taxable income, and New Jersey exempts wrongful death recoveries from the transfer inheritance tax. Interest and certain other components can be treated differently. We recommend confirming the specifics with a tax professional before any distribution.
How soon do we need to call?
Sooner helps, mainly because of evidence rather than deadlines. That said, there is no wrong time, and plenty of families reach out months later once the immediate weight has lifted a little.
Let Us Carry the Legal Side of This
Your family should be allowed to grieve without also becoming a claims department. That is the part we can take from you.
Call Reinartz Law Firm at (201) 289-8614 to speak with a New Jersey wrongful death attorney at whatever hour works, or send us a message through our contact page. Our office is at Court Plaza South, West Wing, 21 Main St., Suite 205, Hackensack, NJ 07601, and we represent families throughout Bergen County and across New Jersey.
Tell us about the person you lost. We will listen, and then we will tell you honestly what can be done.
The Reinartz Law Firm - Hackensack Office
Court Plaza South - West Wing
21 Main St Suite 205,
Hackensack, NJ 07601
