In August last year, New York State opened up a one-year lookback window for child victims of sexual abuse, whose statute of limitations had otherwise passed, to file civil action.

With court proceedings largely on hold because of the coronavirus, that window is quickly closing.

"We've been told by the courts over the weekend that there will be no filings of any kind unless it's an emergency so at this point the court system won't even allow us to file a lawsuit or a motion or anything until that order is lifted," attorney Steve Boyd said.

Boyd's office has filed well over 100 lawsuits in the last eight months on behalf of people who say they were sexually abused as children. He said he has roughly 100 more in the queue.

"We've been in prep mode for the last several weeks," Boyd said. "We were just getting ready to file them. Now we can't file anything for a while."

He said his firm can handle a hiatus for a couple of weeks but if court proceedings remain in limbo for any longer than that it will cause problems.

"We don't generally let our cases go anywhere near the end of a statute of limitations so our hope would be to have everything filed before then but you can imagine that if society is operating the way it's operating now and this continues for a long period of time, it's really going to compress the amount of time that people have to bring a case," Boyd said.

To further complicate things, the attorney said he expected many people to wait on filing sensitive cases about sexual abuse near the end of the window. He believes the state Legislature will soon need to start considering extending the deadline, which is currently August 13 at midnight.

"Once the wave passes and we're out of this critical stage of safety first, then these are issues that are going to have to be addressed," Boyd said.

There is already a bill in the state Senate and Assembly that would extend the window by a year. Western New York Democrats Tim Kennedy and Sean Ryan both say they support an extension.

"The CVA was designed to allow survivors of abuse to seek justice," Ryan said. "However, with the business of our state on pause, their ability to seek that justice has been substantially disrupted. We can't let an unforeseen global pandemic impact survivors' ability to hold their abusers accountable. I would support a common sense extension of the CVA that would ensure survivors are given the appropriate amount of time to decide how they would like to proceed on their own terms."