The Importance of Evidence

Good morning, I’m Dick Galloway. I’m a lawyer at QuatriniRafferty and it’s legal tip Tuesday. I’m one of the ones who tries jury trials for QuatriniRafferty, and I live in a world where it’s important what happened, but it’s equally important that we have evidence of what happened. Let me give accident, were there witnesses to this accident who could help you? Yes. Who are they? Oh, I don’t know they were there, and they were helpful to us, but then they left. If we don’t know their name and address or at least some contact information, they are witnesses who could have been essential to the trial of the case and who are now gone and lost forever. And it happens time after time after time.

So, as a trial lawyer worrying about evidence, I’d like to tell you some of the things that you can do important for yourself. Let’s talk about an auto accident. If you’re in an auto accident, you have your phone with you and your phone is capable of taking photos – take photos of all the vehicles that are involved, take photos of the inside of your vehicle. If it’s been damaged, if somebody’s injured and their injury is obvious, you might want to take a picture of that. You can take a picture of the license plate of the other vehicle. All of those things are important. And as I like to tell people, photos are cheap evidence. They’re not expensive to produce and we can enlarge them many times electronically. When we get to trial, we can put up big screens and electronically show the photos to the jury. But they’re terrific evidence. Juries are very convinced by photographs more so than by mere testimonies. So, photographs are important.

Secondly. I talked about in the example, get the names addresses and phone numbers of people who stop to render aid or just to look around or who tell you “I saw the accident happen, it was clearly the other side’s fault.” Get that person’s name and address. We have investigators we can send out and who will get that information nailed down and it will go a long way toward making it able for us to settle your case advantageously or if we have to go to trial. Having a person who is a witness who’s not affiliated with either side, who’s a truly independent witness, that big medicine in one of these cases, and the jury will be much more convinced by that person, then they will by the plaintiff who’s making the claim, or the defendant who’s accused of being negligent. So, get those names and addresses and if you do all of that, if at the accident scene, you get some photos.

If at the accident scene, you’ll do your best to find out who the witnesses are. You’ve gone a long way toward making sure that you’ll have a successful outcome and we’ll be able to recover for all that you’ve gone through. For the pain and suffering and inconvenience and loss of earnings and all of the other measures of damages that we can show we’ll now be able to recover those for you and do well by you, and it’s all because you’ve started the case on the right foot by getting the evidence that we need in the courtroom.