After an accident, what you do next can make all the difference. In part 3 of our Road to Recovery series, catastrophic injury lawyer Clarke Speaks breaks down what really matters after you’ve been hurt — from documenting the scene to avoiding costly mistakes on social media.
This video will discuss the right way to record evidence, how to protect your case during recovery, and what clients can expect once they hire a law firm. Clarke also reveals why having an experienced attorney can make your case up to three and a half times more valuable, and what happens if negotiations fail and the case moves to litigation.
Here’s what we discuss in this episode:
🚗 Document Everything: Photos, damage, and injury details help tell your story later.
⚠️ Be Careful Online: How one social media post can undermine your entire claim.
🏥 Focus on Healing: Let your legal team handle the paperwork while you recover.
🧾 Inside the Process: How lawyers gather records, negotiate, and build a demand package.
💼 Why Lawyers Matter: Clients with representation earn 3.5x more on average.
0:00 – Documenting your accident
1:50 – Be careful on social media
4:20 – What’s your role in the process?
Featured Keyword & Other Tags
Recover, catastrophic injury, attorney, experience, legal experts, relationships, victims
Client Links
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Transcript (Click To Read)
Should You Document Your Own Accident and Physical Injuries?
Clark: I’m Clark Speaks, the catastrophic injury lawyer. Welcome to the verdict.
Carson Grace Toomer: Say I’m in an accident and I’m able to do so. How much should I document myself? Is that something that I would give to you later, or does that not matter? Is that something that you can go back and get well?
Clark: So I think it’s important to, number one, take pictures of the scene, right? You want to take pictures of if you can. If you can do so safely now. Now, if you’re in the middle of a busy interstate highway, you don’t need to be getting out, or if it would subject you to a medical risk, like if you have a broken bone, I don’t want you to. But to the extent you’re able, uh, it’s good to record, um, images or whatever of what you see, of what’s available to you, because we got to be able to describe it later. They might try to say, well, the cars weren’t that damaged. So if you can show the degree to which cars were damaged, you know, that’d be great. The relative position of the cars might be important. Uh, you know, if you do have, um, physical injuries that are evident, Visibly evident, then you might want to get somebody else to take a picture of those in the hospital or whenever you get to a stable place, you know, because we want to tell this story, and the more completely we can tell it, the better. Um, so, sure, yeah, we want you to document that. We’re also going to gather that information ourselves, right when you come in and when you work with us, we’re going to. We’re going to have you, um, sign medical releases that will allow us to gather medical records and medical bills. And then we’re going to do that. We have, uh, very, very talented and dedicated and committed, uh, case managers and legal assistants and paralegals that are going to go out and get that information, and they’re going to assemble all that information in a way that’s compelling for the insurance companies, and so they’re going to do their part. And then the other thing about it that goes along with the documentation of it that you have to be careful of is social media. I mean, we live in a world where people document a lot of the things they do. Maybe what they had for dinner, maybe what they have for breakfast when they’re on a vacation, when they’re all these graduations, weddings, births and all that kind of stuff. You gotta be real careful about documenting these types of things because you don’t know how it’s going to look later. You know, and, um, I’ll give you an example. Um, you know, we had. We have had, ah, uh, this is a long time ago. I used to work for the insurance company, right? I used to. I used to. I used to defend these kinds of cases when I worked for the insurance companies. And I remember there was a lady who had some pretty serious injuries. And, um, she, um, was claiming all these serious injuries, and they were legitimate injuries. The guy I worked for somehow managed to get some video that showed that she was doing something recreationally that seemed to be inconsistent with these injuries. Um, and when you talked, when you found out about it later, uh, what you found is that she was on medication when she was performing these kinds of activities. And then as a result of performing these activities, she probably stretched herself farther than she should have. And so for the next several days, she was in more pain than she would have been, and she had to recover from that. But it still was a bad look for them. And so, uh, the insurance company, uh, that my employer was working for, exploited that to his advantage and to her detriment. And so what we would want to do is we would want to be able to not put that information out there and be careful about how that will look. You know, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to be untruthful. In no way does that mean that. It just means, hey, if you’re going to. First of all, we would say, hey, don’t put yourself in that position. Don’t strain yourself when you’re trying to recover. You know, don’t do that. But second of all, you know, be careful about what. You don’t put anything like that on social media because they can use it to your detriment. They’ll use it to make it look you seem like a liar. And then third of all, if you do find yourself in that position, we want to be able to document the other side of it the three or four days after that when she was in bed trying to recover from where she had pushed herself. And she. So the social media component of accident, uh, cases can be damaging because people would try to push themselves for special occasions and under certain circumstances and then maybe exacerbate, uh, injuries and complicate their. Their, uh, injuries and also their case. So we would want them to be careful about that.
Carson Grace Toomer: Okay, so I hire you as my attorney to represent me. To what extent am I involved in working with you?
Clark: Yeah, that’s a great question. So you’re injured in an accident, hypothetically, and you hire our firm, uh, to help you. And what we want you to be able to do is to work on getting better. You know, we want you to focus on your medical treatment, taking care of your family and trying to get back to normal. And then we want to be able to do everything else. We want to be able to gather the records, the medical records, gather the witness, uh, statements and police reports. So we have for example, uh, uh, full time uh, in house investigators that
00:05:00
Clark: will go out and collect witness statements and uh, videos and uh, pictures of the scene and all that kind of stuff. Um, we have um, uh, paralegals and lawyers that will go out and build the legal components to your case and collect all the medical records and medical bills and documents that are relevant to your case. We’ll put that all together with individuals who are trained and professionally, uh, write this up in a demand that’s going to be specifically geared to trigger the different components of their analytical tool. Insurance companies have um, an analytical tool that they use. It’s a mathematical computer model and linear regression model that um, allows them to enter certain things into their system and based on the presence or absence of certain factors, trigger value responses that will say, okay, well based on the presence of these factors, this case has a value of so and so and so. We want to make sure that that’s correctly documented and accurately documented. You know, we’re not going to put stuff in there that’s not truthful, but we want to make sure that everything that did occur is correctly documented, whether it’s medical bills, medical treatments, diagnostic treatments, future uh, medicals or any of those kinds of things. We want to be able to make sure that those things lost wages, you know, those kinds of things. So um, or if somebody was up for a promotion and they couldn’t get a promotion or a new job, they couldn’t get a new job, those, any of those things. We want to be able to tell as comprehensive a story as we can. And so our demand writers will include that. And then, and then, and then we’ve got different people who will then submit that information, review it, submit it, and then the first thing that they’ll do is they’ll start negotiating with the insurance company. And these are people that negotiate all day, every day. And they negotiate on injury claims all day, every day. So they’re really, really good at it. And so when an insurance company says hey, well that’s not reasonable and customary or we don’t have to pay for that or our policy is this, then they can go, I understand that’s your policy. But this is the law. This is where the law comes from. This is how the law applies in court. And this is what we would like for you to consider doing in this case. Right? So they know, you know, and also they’ve done it hundreds of times before. So when somebody says, we’re going to pay you this much money, and they know they should be paying this much money, they know they can see that. And so because they can see that, they’re better able to handle that and handle that negotiation. And that’s why, you know, one of the questions people always say is, well, should I get a lawyer? Can I do it myself? Right? And the reality is that people, uh, who have a lawyer under these circumstances, uh, statistically get three and a half times more money for when they have a lawyer than when they don’t. And this is the reason is because these people do these things all day, every day, negotiate these claims and gather these records, and then most of our claims resolve right then at that negotiation. And that’s probably on average, nine, ten months into after an accident. Um, now if a person is more seriously injured, their treatment will drag on more or continue on more. And so that might extend that. But, uh, in general, uh, for an ordinary case, a back sprain, a back strain, cervical strain, those kinds of things, uh, broken arm, broken leg, uh, maybe they didn’t require a surgery. If it requires a surgery, it’s going to extend it. But you’re talking about 10 months, a year, something like that. If we can’t get it negotiated in that time, um, and we can’t come to an agreement, we say this much, and they say all we’re paying is this much. And so then what we have to do is we have to go to litigation. And that goes to a different group within our operation, within our organization, goes to the litigation department, and they have all the stuff that they need because pre litigation has built it, and they hand them this file that’s ready to go to litigation. It’s screened to make sure we have all the things that we need. And then we immediately file, uh, a lawsuit. And then we start with the process of, uh, written discovery, uh, depositions, mediation, and most all of those cases resolve right there, you know, at mediation, because we have done the things that we needed to do, prepare. So how much is involved from the perspective of the person up until litigation, we want those people to worry about getting better and let us take care of everything else. Now we’re going to call you here and there and say, hey, you know, how are you doing. We’re going to call you here if we have trouble getting a record. Sometimes we have medical providers that are. That just are. They’re overwhelmed, they’re overworked, they’re understaffed. They. They can’t get the medical records that we send requests. We send requests, and they’re not responsive. And so what we may do is say, hey, listen, you’re telling us you want to proceed with this claim quickly. So what we’d like for you to do is when you go to the doctor next, or if you could call the doctor’s office and say to them, hey, I really need these records. Can
00:10:00
Clark: I come by and pick them up? And then that might be something that, based on your, um, interest in moving your case forward, we ask you to do. But that’s one out of 30 times, probably one out of 25 times. It’s not very frequent, and there might be something here or there that we might. You say, hey, can we expedite this? And we’re saying, hey, we’re doing everything that we can. Uh, possible. We’re not waiting on us, but we’re having a problem getting this from this person. We might say, hey, if you call them, they might be responsive as well. That might help help them move the case along. So that’s the kind of thing that we might ask for your participation in, uh, and your help in. Now, once a case gets into litigation, which is again, about 10% of cases, uh, it’s not a very high number of cases. Most cases don’t. Usually. These are more serious cases, cases that involve, uh, you know, more, uh, serious injuries, maybe lifelong effects. Not always. Sometimes it’s. It’s those. But a lot of times those do involve more serious cases, more serious injuries. Um, there’s going to be. And after litigation commences, there’ll be more required of an individual. A person will have to help answer interrogatories, help answer requests for production of documents, help answer, uh, admissions, and then also participate in a deposition, participate in the preparation for deposition, participate in a mediation, and then ultimately maybe even participate in a trial. I don’t want people to be afraid of that process. Uh, it does require time, but also, if we get to that point, which is in a very few cases, we are going to make sure that a person is prepared and knows what they’re doing. Again, most of the reason why people are fearful of these things is because they don’t know what to expect. And so in that situation, we want to turn the lights on so they know exactly what to expect. So they’re prepared so that they walk in not going, oh, my gosh, what’s this guy going to ask me? So they know. So when the question comes, they go, I knew you were going to ask me that. And here’s the answer, you know. And so we feel like if a person is prepared, then they’ll be confident. If they’re confident, they’ll perform well. If they perform well, then we’ll get the result that we want. And that’s been our experience. Thanks for joining us. Don’t forget to subscribe and follow us to stay up to date with our weekly episodes. We’ll see you next time.
