If you are hurt in an Indiana car accident, depending on how badly you have been injured, you may not focus on the details necessary to make sure you can get a fair recovery for yourself or someone in your family. As I said in my introduction, you simply must keep good records. This means more than just making sure you get the other driver’s personal and insurance information. It means keeping receipts for rented crutches, over-the-counter and prescription medications, correspondence from your own insurance carrier, and the like. Here is a starter list of the things to keep:
Police or other agency traffic accident reports. If you can do it at the scene of the accident, get the important stuff right there, including the personal and insurance information about the other driver, his or her plate and driver’s license number, place of employment, and the name and badge number and police agency of the officer making the report. You would be surprised how many people can’t remember whether or not the officer’s uniform was brown or blue! If this can’t happen for some reason, get to work on it (or have someone do it for you) at once, even if you must do so from a hospital bed. Reason: not everyone tells the truth at these times, and having the details will guard against losing track of the other guy before getting a claim in place. Also, not every detail the officer notes necessarily makes it into the report, and talking to him may be the only effective way of finding some jerk who has done a disappearing act after the accident.
Start a file for medical expenses and other information at once. My partner’s paralegal will tell you this file can take months to reconstruct if the client has not done it, and what you collect is also more likely to be complete than what we try to put together later. It is probably the best thing you can do to help us eventually evaluate your claims for injuries and associated losses. Include these things:
- receipts for all medications, whether or not prescriptions are required for them;
- receipts for bandages, dressings, braces, wheel chair rentals, and even crutches;
- the little slip they give you at the doctor’s office when you check out each time—this will include the uninsured “co-pay” that you may have to pay at the time service is rendered by the physician. The same kind of slip of paper should be saved if they give one to you at physical therapy;
- each of the “explanation of benefits” documents that come from your health carrier. They call these “EOBs,” and they are very helpful in keeping track of what the injuries are costing, whether or not you are paying or the company is doing so for you. Keep in mind here that there is a fair chance you will end up in an argument with the health carrier before it’s over. Just like every other insurance company in the world, they seek to cut costs, and some can be expected to deny coverage, cut payments, or procrastinate for months in making reimbursement to your healthcare providers. See the chapter on health law for other important aspects of this problem;
- make sure you keep a good list of all the healthcare professionals you see in any capacity, beginning with your family physician or the emergency room person. The ER doctor will be identified on the chart created when you are seen there. This should include the chiropractor, the dentist you consult if you have injury to your mouth or teeth, the eye doctor or the folks at the immediate care facility if you have occasion to visit them for some kind of treatment related to the accident.
If the accident drew public interest sufficient to produce news coverage, keep the newspaper clippings and maybe even videotape television coverage. If you can’t get this done, remember that the footage from that story will be available from the station carrying it, and getting a copy is typically not difficult. More than once we have been able to resolve conflicting claims about the situation at an accident scene by reviewing news footage of the whole thing. Your lawyer should know how to contact and deal with the television station to get this done, and as I said, they tend to be cooperative, so long as they get their stuff back and you agree to pay for the cost of copying the tape.
Keep every stitch of paper, no matter how trivial, that comes from either your own auto insurance company or the other guy’s carrier. Sad to say, the era of trusting even your own carrier is gone. And when the same company covers both you and the other driver, things can get really messy. There just are no “good hands” anymore;
If you have conversations with either carrier or get lucky enough to talk to the other driver, make an immediate note of what was said in the conversation. This is what the rules of evidence call a “contemporaneous memorandum” and can be almost as good as live testimony in a trial. The same holds true for what folks say at the accident scene. If you can do it, write down what was said as soon as possible after leaving the scene, date it and keep it with these records. At least a hundred times, I have seen cases where the other guy falls all over himself at the scene, apologizing profusely, offering assistance and making clear admissions of liability. However, once his own carrier has gotten to him, or he has had a chance to cool off, those statements disappear, and they will deny ever having spoken to you at all! In a one case we tried recently, a woman failed to see a red light and plowed into the back of our client’s car when he was stopped at an intersection. He was hurt but most of the injuries didn’t start showing up until a few hours later, so he got our of his car and talked with her. She was ever so sorry, cried and was most solicitous for his wellbeing. Not so at trial, however, or even in her deposition. I guess the realities changed after the lawyer had a visit with her. So write it down at once.
The repair estimates, tow records, actual costs of repair, car rental, taxi fares necessitated by being without a car, actual repair bills and receipts and copies of insurance checks paying for that damage are all important. Too often any more companies get difficult over fixing your car or try to get in your pocket when valuing the vehicle if it is, in their opinion, a total loss. It’s a dirty trick, but they can push an insured around pretty effectively if they combine an unfair offer for the damaged vehicle with a decision to terminate rental car coverage. “This is how much we will pay for your old jalopy. Oh—and by the way—turn in your rental car in the morning.” “But that’s an unfair value for my fine, low-mileage ride, and you know it. And besides, how will I get to work or to the doctor if you stop my rental car coverage?!” Just the point. They’ve gotcha. The rental car is history, so you must take the insufficient offer on your own car so you can use it to go buy another. We can help there, but only if we have these records that tell us what happened to the car and how much it’s really worth. In once case, the air bags failed to deploy upon impact, and we were interested in examining the wreck for evidence of failure. The company was in the process of moving and destroying the vehicle when we tracked it down and prevailed on them to hold it until we could determine whether or not the air bag issue was real.
*Note. Your own photos of your damaged car may be very useful at trial. Before the car is repaired or declared “totaled” and sold for parts or crushed, you or a friend should take pictures, inside and out. Do not count on the insurance company to do this. A really important feature here is the detail included in the pictures. Photos taken at the wrecker yard in poor light, after a fresh snow has fallen are of little use. Damage location and severity, multiple impact points, condition of tires and even brake pads can be crucial, and I can tell from looking at thousands of them, such detail is seldom present in the instant-develop type pix those guys take.
Finally, keep copies of all correspondence you receive from the police or the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. If there is confusion over “financial responsibility” on either side, that is, the existence and extent of insurance coverage, BMV will be corresponding with the parties. Also, in cases where liability for the accident—fault—is in issue, official actions taken by the police to charge one side or the other with traffic violations in connection with the accident are crucial. It’s difficult to maintain that one is not at fault when the cops have charged you with reckless driving. So keep this stuff that comes to you, and if the other side is charged with violations, follow up with the authorities to make sure you know what happens. Staying in touch with the prosecutor may be the best way to accomplish this, so the case doesn’t slip through the cracks and disappear. You really want that conviction for reckless driving, speeding, disobeying signals, or drunk driving against the other guy to happen. Several times I have been retained to assist accident or other crime victims as a liaison with the police and prosecutor’s offices, keeping track of the progress and disposition of cases like these. Your accident lawyer should do so, because having serious criminal charges slip through the cracks of the court system can really hurt your position when settlement—or trial—time comes along. Most prosecutors can be counted on not to deal away drunk driving cases where an accident with injuries has been part of the equation. However, as the bumper sticker says, “Things happen,” and incompetence, administrative error, missed court dates, and even the rare but possible instance of collusion between authorities and the defendant do occur. But when we are watching the progress of the whole criminal proceeding, showing up at pretrial conferences, guilty pleas and sentencings. Remember that victims are entitled to notice with regard to all portions of any criminal proceeding that deals with pleas and sentences. And you can imagine how much more attentive the judge will be—and how much harder it will be for a deputy prosecutor to mess things up—if your shining face is there every time.
It may seem like a lot of trouble, but I can tell you from experience that nothing is more helpful to the lawyer’s staff in commencing work on a new case than having a client who has kept some good records. You can’t keep too much, but it’s very easy to keep too little.
These articles are for the benefit of our readers including those from other states besides Indiana, and might not pertain to, or reflect the laws of Indiana or the practice areas of The Garrison Law Firm.
