Resources

Personal Injury Case Investigations

The Intake Investigation – What Lawyers Need to Know. Garbage in, garbage out… truer words were never spoken in regard to personal injury cases. When interviewing your client, it is important to obtain as much information about the incident as possible.  Although minute details may seem superfluous at the beginning of personal injury cases, you never know which case is going to end up in protracted litigation battle where such details can be significant.  Make sure you get plenty of identifying information on your client, such as date of birth, Social Security number and name of a relative.  This will help you should you ever lose contact with your client…

Read the full article

Personal Injury Witness Statements

Options for Witness Statements in Personal Injury Investigations. Personal Injury Investigations: What You Don’t know Can Hurt You. Witness statements in personal injury investigations can make or break your case.  Even if the police report assigns liability to the defendant this is no guarantee of success.  Personal injury witness statements are often the crucial glue that holds your case together.  And contrary to the popular saying, what you don’t know can hurt you… many seemingly great cases have been sunk because key witnesses were unreliable or discredited unbeknownst to the attorney…

Read the full article

Personal Injury Scene Investigations & Photos

Evidence That Can Make or Break Your Personal Injury Case. It is important to have photographic documentation of the evidence early on in your personal injury investigation before the evidence is changed or is no longer available.  This includes photos of the vehicles, scene investigations photographs and injury photographs.  The alterations that could change include the repair of vehicles, the wearing away of skid marks and changes made as a result of subsequent construction at the scene of an accident…

Read the full article

Ongoing Investigation of Personal Injury Cases

Tracking Investigation Evidence Through to Trial. Many average personal injury cases settle within the first year.  If your case does not settle in a year it is important to diary and contact witnesses at least once a year to keep track of them.  If witnesses cannot be found, a legal investigator has the resources to locate them.  If in the early stages you only have witness forms filed out and a trial is starting to look likely; you may want to consider hiring a legal investigator to obtain formal declarations and get sufficient anchor information to keep track of witnesses.  If either you or the defense notices the depositions of witnesses, it may be advisable to have an investigator obtain a statement from these witnesses prior to the deposition to avoid surprises and lock in their testimony…

Read the full article