How To Use Your Accident Diary To Help Your Case

An accident diary helps to preserve details – facts and pieces of evidence – related to your injuries. These are things you need to strengthen your claims. However, this diary should be slightly different from conventional diaries. Here is how to make sure that it helps your case:

Show It to Your Doctor

Use your diary entries to describe how you are feeling, when you feel them (for example back pain at night) and things like that. If you don't put them down, then you can forget some of them by the time you see a doctor, physical therapist or any other medical professional. Of course, you need to make the diary concise since you will be showing it to different third parties.

Describing your injuries and the limitations they have brought into your life helps your doctor to understand your health better. Apart from that, it also helps to give weight to your claims to the insurance company. Merely writing your symptoms may not be enough to prove them to insurance companies. Your therapist can validate your claims when he or she reads the symptoms and acts on them (for example by performing diagnostic tests or prescribing medication).

Include Specifics

Make your diary entries as specific as possible. Include all details whether or not you think they are relevant, it is not up to you to decide what is relevant. Some of the details you need to describe (factually) include:

• Names of people involved in the accident (don't write a "middle-aged woman", put down her legal name).
• Where the accident happened (the name of the street is more precise than merely saying "downtown").
• When the accident happened (merely saying just after lunch is not precise, state the time).
• Telephone numbers and addresses of witnesses and anybody connected to the accident.
• Weather conditions.

With these specific descriptions, you don't have to generalize anything while discussing your injuries with the lawyer or insurance company; you just refer to your diary.  Use the information to write a powerful and effective demand letter, which you use to show your side of the story to the other motorist's insurance company.

When you write an accident of your own volition, then the other motorist's legal team can use it against you. Keep this in mind when deciding which details to include in the diary. However, if you make it at the request of your attorney, then it may be protected under attorney-client privilege. (For more information on sip and fall attorneys, contact Putnam Lieb)

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