How Important is Preserving Evidence?
If you have been involved in a car accident, truck accident or any vehicle accident, one of the most important pieces of evidence in your case is the vehicle itself. It is critical that the vehicle be preserved in its crashed state – unaltered – should the injured victims or their families decide to pursue a personal injury claim. Why is this important? Because, in a car accident case, an accident reconstruction expert will need to examine and measure the crashed vehicles to determine various facts such as the speed at which the vehicle was traveling.
If an auto product defect caused the accident or if a product failure resulted in serious injuries, then the expert will investigate whether the vehicle performed or failed to properly perform in protecting the driver or the passenger. This could mean seatbelt defects, seatback failure, tire defects, engine defects, roof crush, airbag defects or other design defects that may have caused the vehicle to become unstable and crash. In such cases, if you lost the vehicle, you lose the case and the compensation that you were otherwise entitled to receive.
Preserving such evidence is not a complicated task, but it must be done quickly and in a timely manner in order to make sure that the evidence is not lost or destroyed. For instance, in an auto accident, the vehicles must be preserved. An experienced and knowledgeable Seattle personal injury lawyer can do this on your behalf by tracking down the vehicles and sending appropriate letters to whoever has possession of these vehicles – be it the police department or a tow yard.
But quick action is crucial. Insurance companies and tow yard will often move very quickly to clear out these wrecked vehicles from their inventory and send it out to be crushed for scrap metal. Often times, you may need to pay salvage value for the vehicle or pay storage fees. But, any lawyer worth his salt will tell you that it is absolutely worth paying those fees because the evidence must be preserved. It would also be in the best interest of victims or their families to take possession of the vehicle and store it in a secured, covered facility where it will not tampered with or exposed to the elements.
If you or a loved one has been injured in a car accident, please contact the experienced Washington auto accident lawyers at The Bernard Law Group for a FREE and comprehensive consultation. Please call us at 1-800-418-8282 or e-mail us at info@bernardlawgroup.com. We can also send you our FREE informational brochure about Washington car accident cases, which has useful educational information that will help you understand your legal rights and options. Get in touch with Kirk Bernard and his skilled legal team today.
