Winning Your Case When You Don’t Remember How the Accident Happened

In a typical injury case, often the most powerful testimony or evidence that a jury can hear, is yours, the injured person. It is both persuasive, and first-person, in that you were the one who was there and living the accident.

You Don’t Remember?

But it often happens that the accident victim doesn’t remember how the accident happened.

This often happens for one of two reasons.

One situation is simply adrenaline; as you know from your own life experience, often traumatic events get erased from our brains, we simply don’t recall them as easily as non-traumatic events.

The other situations are head injuries that lead to blackouts. Many concussion victims will say that they remember being in one place and then waking up in the hospital, with no memory of what happened during the accident.

How Not Remembering Affects Your Case

Not remembering how an accident happened can make a case more difficult, but it in no way means that you can’t get compensation for your injuries; you certainly can. It just means that you may have to rely on other forms of evidence or testimony.

Car accidents will have a police report and while these reports aren’t always accurate, they at least give a baseline of facts for the insurance company to see what happened. That police report also will often have the contact information for any witnesses who may have seen the accident.

If you were involved in a fall accident, someone from the property may have taken an accident report, as well as photos or videos from the fall. That evidence can be obtained and used as well.

There may even be evidence of you telling someone how the accident happened at the time of the accident, even if you don’t remember what happened. For example, you may have provided information for an accident report after a fall at the time of the fall.

Using Reconstructionists

Accident reconstructionists can often piece together how an accident happened, especially a car accident. By looking at damage to the vehicles involved, photos, markings or damages to the street, or other pieces of physical information, a reconstructionist can explain to a jury how the accident happened.

Get an Attorney if You Don’t Remember

If you do feel that for whatever reason, you don’t have a full and accurate recollection of how the accident happened, it is even more imperative that you get an injury attorney early.

That’s because if you’re speculating or guessing about how the accident happened, you can end up giving wildly inconsistent versions of the accident to whoever asks you about it, because you don’t have a perfect memory of the accident. Even though that’s an innocent and understandable error, it still can damage your ability to get compensation for your injuries.

Call our Boston personal injury lawyers at The Law Office of Joseph Linnehan, Jr. today at 617-275-4200 for help if you were in an accident but don’t remember how it happened.

Source:

arcca.com/capabilities/engineering/accident-reconstruction/