The law is based on observations by Hy Zimmerman, a major scholar of drug-induced liver injury.

Drug-induced liver injury is responsible for 5% of all hospital admissions and 50% of all acute liver failures.

Hy's law is a prognostic indicator that a pure drug-induced liver injury (DILI) leading to jaundice, without a hepatic transplant, has a case fatality rate of 10% to 50%.

The major problem in managing adverse effects and drug-induced liver injury is determining which medication is the offending culprit and distinguishing drug toxicity from hepatic flares associated with IRIS.

Hepatotoxicity and drug-induced liver injury also account for a substantial number of compound failures, highlighting the need for drug screening assays, such as stem cell-derived hepatocyte-like cells, that are capable of detecting toxicity early in the drug development process.