How to NOT lose evidence for your accident case!
After a car accident, it’s vital that you keep and maintain all evidence that’s within your possession which might be relevant to your accident case.
You also need to protect yourself by making sure that the potential defendants preserve evidence in their possession as well.
What steps should I take right after a car accident?
Some of the most important pieces of evidence will be found right at the scene of your car accident. These range from:
Pictures of your injuries and your car’s damage.
Pictures of the scene of your car accident, like the road condition at the accident scene.
Contact information of the other drivers involved AND eyewitnesses.
If you can, use your cell phone to gather as much information as possible; this will help you prove your personal injury claim to the other driver’s insurance and/or in court.
Don’t neglect to get a police report created about your car accident. This will provide an official account of events; this official account is especially important if you can’t gather evidence on your own after the accident.
Even if you don’t want to file a lawsuit, insurance claims that have proper evidence behind them nearly always go significantly better than the ones that don’t.
Be sure to keep your gathered evidence in a safe place after gathering it. If you accidentally destroy, throw away, or delete your evidence, it will be devastating to your chances of winning.
What kind of evidence is important for my accident case?
Depending on what kind of cases, you’re facing, the key pieces of evidence will differ:
Car accidents:
Photos of your injuries,
Photos of the scene of the accident and nearby road conditions
Photos of the damaged vehicles.
Eyewitness accounts of the accident
Slip and Fall:
What particular clothes you were wearing during the slip-and-fall incident
The store’s surveillance camera footage
Dog bites:
Photos of your injuries
A neighbor’s video footage from a doorbell camera, like a Ring camera
Eyewitness accounts of the dog attack
Product Liability:
Photos of your injuries
The defective product that hurt you
What can I do to preserve evidence after my car accident;
How do I protect evidence that is held by parties not involved in my car accident?
Much of the best kind of evidence is not directly accessible to you after the accident, and may be in the hands of a third party not involved in the crash, or even the other driver(s). You must take swift action in order to ensure that evidence is not destroyed or lost.
You’ll need to be proactive in obtaining the evidence held by third parties; you’ll often have to ask for it since that evidence isn’t already in your possession after the crash.
Third parties to your accident case can include:
Eyewitnesses
People who were near the scene of the accident
Stores and other businesses in the vicinity
Anyone else who may have evidence whom you aren’t suing for causing your accident.
Some common examples of evidence which third-parties may have are:
Witness statements, which they can provide to you in the form of an affidavit or a deposition
Footage from surveillance cameras
Property damage evaluations, like a mechanic’s statement about your car’s condition after a crash
Asking for this information as soon as possible can be vital to your case. Witnesses might forget what they saw or change their contact details, making it impossible to reach them for their account of the events. It’s common for surveillance cameras to have their footage routinely deleted after a certain amount of time too.
How do I preserve evidence that is in the defendant’s possession?
Often in California personal injury cases, the defendant will have important evidence in their possession. There are penalties for altering or destroying it, but the defendant may choose to do so anyways.
This is one reason why having a personal injury lawyer can be crucial to you recovering damages after your accident.
Your lawyer can send potential defendants an anti-spoliation letter, also known as an evidence preservation letter. This letter will inform the recipient that they have potentially important evidence, and also will warn them that if they destroy it or “spoil” it, they can face serious consequences.
An anti-spoliation letter should have the following:
A notice of future potential litigation
A summary of the case’s relevant facts
A formal request that the recipient preserve evidence which might be relevant to the case
How long to preserve the evidence for
A request for the contact information of the people who possess that evidence.
In a car accident, this letter should be sent to the defendant AND their insurance company. Be sure to send it in a way that lets you know they received it, and keep a copy for your own records.
To comply, the recipient should put a litigation hold in place to pause their routine document retention and destruction policies. This will be especially important for electronically stored information, or ESI.
This litigation hold can also preserve other types of discoverable information too, such as relevant documents and physical evidence.
Taking these steps can ensure that these kinds of evidence will still be available if your case must go further into litigation to the point that discovery requests must be made.
What is spoliation of evidence in a California personal injury lawsuit?
In a personal injury case, spoliation of evidence is the destruction, alteration, or failure to preserve evidence that is relevant to:
Pending civil litigation or a criminal matter,
Or future litigation or criminal cases.
This means spoliation of evidence does not apply only to current lawsuits, but future lawsuits that someone could be planning to file as well!
Even if it was done as a mistake, the destruction of that evidence can still be considered spoliation of evidence and carry the appropriate penalties.
Under California law, the obligation to preserve evidence is generally established when the holder of that evidence becomes aware of the need to preserve it. Thus, it is extremely important to get a lawyer in order to send anti-spoliation letters.
Prior case rulings in California tort law, as with Johnson v. United States Automobile Association (1998), may indicate that, if the person who negligently or intentionally spoiled evidence is not a party in your car accident’s lawsuit, you may be able to take action against them as well.
In simpler terms: You generally have the right to sue any third party that negligently destroys or fails to preserve evidence pertaining to your civil matter, so long as they were put on notice to preserve it.
If the opposing party negligently or intentionally destroys evidence, or if a third-party intentionally destroys it, you can request the trial court to do the following:
Issue jury instructions to make the inference that the destruction of evidence is proof of liability
Issue court orders to preserve all remaining evidence and relevant information
Or impose sanctions against the offending party.
Is Spoliation of Evidence a crime in California?
Yes, Spoliation of Evidence can be a crime.
California Penal Code 135 makes it a misdemeanor offense to do the following:
Willfully hide or destroy evidence, and
Do so while knowing that such evidence is relevant to a trial or other legal proceeding.
Being convicted of Destroying or Concealing Evidence can be punished with:
6 months in county jail, and/or
$1,000 in fines.
