Your Mom Wrecked! Use Your Smart Phone To Create Powerful Forensic Evidence for Her South Carolina Case

Your Mom wrecked! 

The collision site is now a crime scene. Even if you're not a policeman, attorney, private investigator, or paralegal, you can still help your Mom's wreck investigation with one simple, everyday tool to gather forensic evidence and support her claim--the smart phone. This post gives you some examples of the powerful way you can use a smart phone to help your Mom.

The dictionary defines forensic  as "the application of scientific knowledge to legal problems." In the courtroom, forensic evidence is powerful. Forensic evidence includes pictures, videos, and careful measurements of time and space. Forensic evidence corroborates testimony. It is vitally important because it establishes a factual record that is not easily attacked by insurance defense lawyers. 

What kind of forensic evidence does your Mom need to prove her wreck case? Obviously, she needs proof of the other driver's carelessness. But she also needs proof of her harms and losses. Gathering forensic evidence for harms and losses is often overlooked by lay people. However, the damages element is the most important part of your Mom's claim. Forensic evidence of your Mom's harms and losses documented with a smart phone enhance the probability your Mom will make a full monetary recovery. 

The ubiquitous smart phone is your best tool for making a good forensic record. Send the image, audio and video files you make with it to yourself (or your attorney) by email, save them to your computer's hard drive, and upload them to an Internet file storage service (e.g., Dropbox) as backup. 

Here are some examples of how to use a smart phone to create forensic proof.

• Take pictures of the vehicle damage.

The insurance company will take pictures of the vehicles. However, the insurance company takes photographs designed to minimize the collision impact. (Insurance defense lawyers like to argue the collision impact did not cause injury.) Therefore, your Mom needs pictures of the car to prove the vehicle damage. 

Think like a CSI. If a paint smudge on your car helps proves someone hit you, take the picture of the smudge.  If the dent location supports your description of the collision, take a picture. Take pictures of the interior. Look for bent steering wheels and star patterns on the glass.  Photograph the speedometer and odometer.  

It is worth a trip to the facility where your Mom's car is stored to gather this evidence.

• Record Witnesses

Make audio recordings of witness interviews. At the beginning, ask them for their names, addresses, and telephone numbers and let them know you are recording. Get them to tell what happened to cause the collision. Ask them if anyone was hurt and for a description of the injuries. It is even worth attempting to get a recording of the other driver. Keep your audio files short, sweet, and to the point. These are wonderful bits of forensic evidence at trial.

• Make a Video of Your Mom's Route 

Recreate the trip. This will help explain how dangerous the other driver is to other people on the roadway. As they watch, the jurors will imagine that they are sitting in your Mom's car which is about to be in a bad collision. The feeling is literally like watching a train wreck.

Plus, the recreation video is often used to overcome excuses or misrepresentations by the careless driver. He might claim that your Mom was at fault for speeding, or that the sun was in his eyes, or that he didn't have time to see your Mom because of a curve or hill in the road. Use your smart phone and take pictures from his perspective. The pictures will show how easily a careful driver might have avoided the collision. 

• Use the Stop Watch.

The stop watch on your smart phone can help recreate the timing of events leading up to the collision. For example, how many seconds elapsed between the time your Mom first saw the other car, and when it pulled out in front of your Mom's path of travel. Very accurate information about timing is often an essential forensic bit used to figure out speed and undermine defenses (excuses). 

• Take pictures of your Mom's injuries as soon as possible

Photographs document evidence of your Mom's injury. It is true that EMS and hospital triage records include medical examination notes that record the doctor's observations of what he saw that day. But you should not rely on the hospital records or the examination notes to accurately record injury data. Hospital records often have conflicting information, omit important facts, or have errors. Take pictures of your Mom's bruises and lacerations. These pictures constitute irrefutable proof of traumatic injury and help to explain the mechanism of your Mom's injury.

• Keep taking pictures as your Mom heals 

You can use a series of photographs to demonstrate how long it took your Mom to overcome her injuries. This is particularly true with a very severe injury which may take months and even years to fully heal.  If there is a residual injury, like a scar, photographs help to prove a permanent injury exists. 

• Take pictures and make movies of your Mom's rehabilitation

If your Mom is stuck in a hospital bed, wheelchair, or uses prosthetic devices to get around, use your smart phone to make short movies of what she is going through. Take pictures of the crutches or wheelchair she uses.  Make a clip of her doing the prescribed daily physical therapy exercise. 

Movies and pictures like these are gold for your attorney during direct examinations. They can be used to demonstrate your Mom's harms and losses in a positive way. They make her testimony interesting and give us visuals to help your Mom tell her story. They illustrate how much time and effort she expended recovering from the harm. 

• Consider an Audio or Video Logbook of her Recovery

Think about an audio or video logbook to contemporaneously record your Mom's feelings during her recovery. Make it part of the story about how your Mom overcame her injury. Let her address the frustration and setbacks along the road and explain how she was able to cope. Make it positive.  Be accurate in your Mom's log. If the contemporaneous recordings about her feelings are authentic, they will dramatically help prove your Mom's harm at trial.

• Copy Documents

You can use the smart phone to capture images of documents. Take pictures of the police incident report. Take pictures of the business cards of witnesses. Take pictures of driver's licenses and insurance documents.  Take pictures of hospital contracts. Take pictures of license plates.

There are applications you may add to your smart phone that will convert these images of documents into Adobe pdf files that are easy to store and share. One example is an application called the Cam Scanner. 

Conclusion

We hope that your Mom does not really have an accident. But if she does, we want to help her with her legal claim.  Thanks for reading!