A neighbor's dog lunges at your seven-year-old on a Brooklyn stoop, and in three seconds her cheek is torn open. Or you walk into a poorly lit Manhattan lobby and a cracked glass door panel shatters across your face. The wounds close, but the scars don't. A facial disfigurement and permanent scarring case is different from almost every other injury claim in New York, because the harm is visible to every person you meet for the rest of your life. That visibility is exactly why

You're feeding cardboard into a roller press at a packaging plant in Suffolk County when your glove catches the in-running nip. The machine pulls your hand in before you can react, and by the time a coworker hits the emergency stop, the skin and soft tissue of your forearm have been peeled away from the muscle underneath like a sock being yanked off a foot. You wake up at Stony Brook University Hospital staring down a year of skin grafts, flap reconstructions, and the kind of