Preserve Evidence to Protect Your Personal Injury Lawsuit

Preserve Evidence to Protect Your Personal Injury Lawsuit

• October 10, 2024
• Categories: Personal Injury

Our legal system is not designed to automatically compensate accident victims. As unfair as it may seem, the law puts the burden on victims to prove personal injury cases. If you can’t present enough evidence to do this as an accident victim, you’ll lose your case and receive no compensation from the at-fault party.

Furthermore, producing just enough evidence to secure a favorable judgment does little good. The goal is not merely to win the case, but to recover enough money to cover all your losses. Gathering evidence about the accident and using it to build a strong case is the only way to make this happen.

Documenting Physical Injury

Medical records are the cornerstone of every personal injury claim. An experienced personal injury lawyer will often point out the strong correlation between the amount of medical treatment a victim receives and the total amount of damages awarded at the conclusion of the case.

Gathering medical records is such an important part of the lawsuit process that you should allow your accident claim attorney to handle it on your behalf. Your law firm will obtain a signed HIPAA release from the client and use it to obtain records directly from the treatment providers. Relevant records come from a variety of sources, including:

• Ambulances/EMTs
• Emergency rooms
• Radiology
• Primary care physicians
• Orthopedic surgeons
• Other medical specialists
• Physical therapy.

When speaking with your treatment providers, you should openly discuss the pain you’re experiencing, so that your medical records reflect it. You can take additional steps to document your injuries by photographing them, keeping a journal, and speaking with loved ones about day-to-day suffering (so that those close to you can later testify on the subject, if necessary).

Collecting Proof of the Other Party’s Fault

The evidence necessary to prove a personal injury case can vary greatly from one lawsuit to the next. For example, in a dog bite accident case, you may only need to show who owns the offending animal. Consulting a dog bite accident attorney can provide clarity on what evidence is crucial for such cases.

On the other hand, in a medical malpractice case, your lawyer will likely need to hire an expert to give testimony about what the doctor or hospital did wrong.

The party responsible for causing an accident may even admit to being at fault. However, even when there is no dispute over the question of liability, victims and their attorneys should be vigilant in preserving evidence. Consider the following hypothetical:

You are stopped at an intersection when another vehicle smashes into you from behind. The other driver is obviously at fault and the police report reflects that. Even though liability is clear, your car accident attorney’s investigator visits the scene, measures skid marks, and speaks to eyewitnesses. It turns out the other driver was speeding through a school zone and talking on a cell phone at the time of the accident. You are now in an even stronger position to negotiate a settlement, due to the egregious conduct of the at-fault driver.

What Is Spoliation of Evidence?

Spoliation of evidence (perhaps more commonly known as “evidence tampering”) refers to the intentional, reckless, or negligent withholding, hiding, altering, fabricating, or destroying of evidence relevant to a legal proceeding.

Say you visit your dentist for a check-up and, because of the dentist’s negligence, you sustain a gum injury. After you initiate legal proceedings, your legal team discovers that the record of your visit no longer exists, despite other similar check-up records from around the same time remaining intact.

In such a situation, your lawyer may be able to assert that the defendant has unlawfully interfered with important evidence. If a court agrees that spoliation has occurred, it may issue adverse inference instructions. This means the judge in the case would instruct the jury to presume the destroyed evidence was unfavorable to the party that destroyed it.

Issues like these present a range of legal challenges. If you think the defendant in your accident case tampered with evidence, you should discuss the situation with your lawyer.

The Challenge of Collecting Old Evidence

As time passes, gathering evidence and building strong cases becomes much more challenging. This happens for a number of reasons.

For example, surveillance footage might be overwritten, witnesses’ memories can fade, and documents or electronic data may be misplaced or deleted.

The statute of limitations is another issue to consider. In most cases, there is a two-year deadline before which you need to file a case; if you wait longer than two years from the date of your accident to file a lawsuit, you will most likely lose the right to pursue compensation through the courts.

This is why we recommend pursuing legal action as soon as possible after an accident occurs. The longer you wait to start the process, the more difficult it will be for you to build a winning case.

You Are Not Alone – Get Help Protecting Your Claim

Insurance companies have teams of accident investigators and attorneys on their payroll. These people are not looking out for your interests – to the contrary, their objective is to minimize the amount of money you receive. Your best countermeasure is to hire a respected personal injury firm to gather the evidence you need to prevail.

At Neale & Fhima, we offer free consultations. To speak directly with one of our experienced car accident attorneys, call 888-407-2955 or request your free consultation online.