Mistakes That Can Hurt Your Injury Case or Claim

What Mistake Can Hurt Your Injury Case or Claim?

Gary Burger is the principle and founder of Burger Law's personal injury law firm in St. Loouis, and has had a distinguished career defending the rights of the injured and vulnerable. Below is a recent transcript of Gary talking about what mistakes can hurt your injury claim.

Gary Burger: What mistakes or behaviors can clients make that make a case more difficult for you to win? There are some things clients can do that hurts their case. We talk about those, we try to counsel people against them. You want to have absolute candor in what happened to you. You never want to exaggerate or minimize anything. You don't want to exaggerate your symptoms to a doctor, but I got clients all the time that go in and say I'm fine.

"Are you really fine?" "No, I'm not. But I don't wanna whine." Men do that all the time. The other mistake you can make is not getting medical care right away. Sometimes people think they'll suck it up and do it, and then it's a month and a half later and they haven't gotten much medical care.

"Are you hurting?" "Yeah, I'm missing work. I can't sleep." "Why don't you go to the doctor?" "Yeah. I didn't wanna meet my deductible," or "I didn't have health insurance." Listen, you have to understand that the defendant in the case is going to say you didn't get medical care because you weren't hurt and you just made it up later.

So you gotta go get medical care. Go get medical care after a car wreck or a personal injury, a truck wreck, premises liability, products liability; it doesn't matter the kind of claim you have.

Go to urgent care. Go to the doctor, get some medical care. Document those things. Do follow-up care. Go to your family doctor. Ask your family doctor if there's physical therapy you can do or a chiropractor you should see, or other types of things you can do to remedy that. If they give you a prescription for flexural or whatever other anti-inflammatory or pain reliever they give you, go fill it. Take the meds, see if it gets you better. Work to get healthy. You'll feel better about that. Get your medical care.

Other mistakes people could make is not documenting an accident scene. I have other videos about what to do in an accident and that kind of stuff. But take pictures of the accident scene. Take a picture of where the cars are or the property damage, the skid mark or the license plate of the car in front of you.

I got in a wreck about a year and a half ago, and the person ran. They hit and ran me and I followed them for a while. They hit a stoplight. I went out and I took a picture of their license plate and then they left and I stopped chasing them, because who cares? I called the police and I went to try to find them and I couldn't track the license plate, but on the corner of my picture there was a sticker for where they had bought the car.

So I called the dealer. And I got all their information and found out who my hit-and-run driver was. I sued him and I got a judgment against him. So you never know what's gonna be in those pictures. Take the pictures if you're at a scene, get the names of witnesses to an accident.

Everybody's gonna show up in the accident report and the police report. You have four people at this accident that saw the light was red. I called the police. Two weeks later, no one's there and you didn't write any of it down, and you're kicking yourself.

So pretend you gotta be your own investigator, get your medical care and then call a lawyer. And a lawyer like me will tell you if you need a lawyer or not. Most good plaintiff's lawyers I know will say, "Listen, you don't need a lawyer for this one. Do it yourself."

Or, "I could really add value to your case. Here's what I can do for you. Here's what I will do for you." And then they follow it up. We can get into the weeds on mistakes or behaviors that a client can make for their case to be more difficult to win. There's all kinds of stuff. Don't drink and drive, be safe, don't break the rules yourself.

What are the things you gotta be careful about though? You gotta be careful on social media. It's not that you need to change who you are, but some people have a different life on social media than it is in reality. That's like the joke, right? Listen, everybody's always out running and having this and doing this great stuff.

If you're at home injured, you can't work, you can't do that. You don't want your social media feed to show something different. And I'm not saying it should, but don't do that. Because the defendant will get your social media and say, "Listen, you said that you can't work, you can't walk, you can't do this. And here I have you checking in at Steinberg Ice skating. You're ice skating, you're going for a bike ride and you're doing all that. I thought you said you couldn't do that." So let's make sure that social media reality matches your reality and don't give information on your social media feed, whether that's Instagram or Facebook Snapchat, TikTok, whatever it is.

Don't put stuff on there that isn't true because the defendant will get up and show it, and then that'll uncut your credibility later on a case you don't wanna do that, you don't wanna hurt your own case.

Gary Burger is a personal injury lawyer with over 30 years of experience in a wide variety of practice areas, including:

• Auto accidents
• Car accidents
• Truck accidents
• Motorcycle accidents
• Slip and falls
• Wrongful death
• Medical malpractice
• Dog bites
• Product liability
• Workers' compensation
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• Exactech Knee Replacement Lawsuit
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• Exactech Hip Replacement Lawsuit
• Ferrari Brake Failure Lawsuit