After a car accident, most people focus on the obvious things like vehicle damage, injuries, insurance claims, and getting back to normal life. But according to Clarke, one of the most important pieces of the entire process is often overlooked: the collision report and the evidence surrounding it.
In this episode, Clarke explains why reporting an accident matters, what information is captured in a police collision report, and how critical evidence can disappear in a matter of days or even hours. We’ll share real-world examples of cases where skid marks, vehicle data, witness statements, and surveillance footage completely changed the outcome of a claim.
Here’s what we discuss in this episode:
🚔 Report The Accident: Documentation matters
📋 Collision Reports: Critical details drive claims
⏳ Evidence Fades Fast: Act quickly after a crash
🔍 Investigation Matters: Small details can change everything
💰 Watch For Liens: Settlements aren’t always yours to keep
0:00 – Do you have to get a report?
5:37 – Getting a copy
11:44 – What else to keep in mind
Featured Keyword & Other Tags
personal injury attorney, car accident claim, collision report, police report, accident investigation, personal injury law, insurance claim, medical liens, accident evidence, injury settlement
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Transcript (Click To Read)
Clark: I’m Clark Speaks, the catastrophic injury lawyer. Welcome to the verdict.
Carson Grace Toomer: We kind of initially had spoke about what to do after an accident, of course, make sure you and the people around you are safe. And. But can we kind of skip to the part where, you know, I’m talking to this police officer and then even so, um, do I have to report, you know, an accident all the time?
Clark: If there’s significant property damage, uh, you know, then, uh, or somebody’s injured, then the accident needs to be reported. And if it’s, if it’s, if it’s me, I advise my family. Just report the accident. Like, if there’s any damage to your car. It’s so tempting just to say to somebody, hey, let’s do this on the, on the honor system, let’s do this. Uh, uh, you know, just, you know, you report it to your insurance company. I’ll report in mine, or I’ll. Maybe you can. We’ll take care of it outside of insurance, and you just bring me a check. And, um, it’s tempting to do that, but there’s a reason to get law enforcement involved. They’re professionals. They’re going to record all the information that’s necessary, and they’re going to make sure you get paid. And instead of. And you get, and you get your. And you get. Make sure that you get the claim handled, uh, as best it can be handled. They’re not perfect. They might make mistakes. They might, you know, but you’re a whole lot better with a record showing that someone hit you and caused damage to your vehicle, even if it’s just personal, even if it’s just property damage, you know. Now if it’s, um, if there’s any injury at all, then you’re obligated to, uh, report it to law enforcement. And then they’ll come out and they’ll do a collision, uh, report. And the collision report will be, uh, you know, two pages. It’ll have all kinds of different information on it. It’ll have road, you know, that, where it happened, when it happened, uh, the weather, the road conditions, road straight. Or they’ll have a diagram of the energy of the intersection or the. Or the place where it happened. They’ll have a diagram of the vehicles or the pedestrians or bicycles or motorcycles or whatever. And it’ll have your statements, it’ll have the other person’s statements. It’ll have an assignment of, um, you know, if any tickets were issued. It’ll have any passengers in the car, their ages, the contact information, vehicle owner, all these kinds of Things are included in this very comprehensive, um, and um, organized, uh, collision report.
Carson Grace Toomer: What would you say is the most important component of that collision report?
Clark: Well, fault is probably the most important. You know, if the, if the uh, if the insurance, I mean, if the investigating, uh, officer, uh, assigns fault to the other party and that’s going to be a prerequisite, that’s going to be important in terms of establishing liability. The uh, identification of the parties is important. Identification of witnesses are important. Um, the relative location of the vehicles are important. So sometimes, uh, the uh, if there’s a very serious accident and uh, so this is one we had to deal with yesterday. Serious accident, but it was a, uh, uh, person was very seriously injured. But the uh, truck that hit this person kept going and they never found them. You know. So now it’s been six months. I wish the person had called us immediately. Um, they didn’t. So it’s been six months. So now what I’ve got to do is go back and try to find witnesses from something that happened six months ago. You know, so, so we have in house investigators and that in house investigators, those in house investigators will go to the businesses to see if there are any cameras. But I can tell you right now that, um, there, there may very well be cameras. But a lot of times those cameras are on loops a week, a month, a day. Sometimes, you know, and sometimes it’s 72 hours. So it just tapes over. So if they don’t, if nobody’s ever requested that information, then those, that footage is probably lost. Uh, so we’ll talk to, try to find witnesses, people that might work there. But if it’s, let’s say it’s a gas station, the people that work there six months ago might not work there now. Um, and one of them is one of the things on the corner is a gas station. And so those collision reports are so critical. There’s so much critical information, you know, you’re asking me what’s the most important thing? It depends on the circumstances. Sometimes it’s the tire impressions that are important. You know, for example, we had a case years ago where, you know, it was a, it was a, it’s a tractor trailer pulls out in front of a car that’s going, you know, cars going down the road. And a tractor pull trailer pulls out from a gas station from refueling, uh, his truck or maybe depositing fuel for everybody else to. And pulls out right in front of my car. So where the two things become important are where on the truck my, uh, client’s car hit Right. If it’s at the front, that means we had less reaction time. If it’s on the back, it means we had more reaction time. Speed, Speed limit. Um, tire impressions. How long were the tire impressions? That’ll show if my guy. If my driver had a, ah, sufficient time to stop. And then a lot of times accident reconstructionists will input all that into their analysis and be able to say, well, this person had 2 seconds to stop or 4 seconds to stop or whatever. And then, and then it’ll be up to, uh, an expert and then ultimately a jury to determine if that’s enough time for a person to stop. And then. And then it becomes, uh. Okay, well, um, the truck driver is liable and negligent for. Is negligent for pulling out in front of the person. But is my driver negligent as well for not stopping when they could have stopped? You know, uh, and then. So how much time that person has in order to stop is a, uh, critical component to that analysis. Right.
Carson Grace Toomer: And so can I get a copy of that at the accident? Or is that something I have to wait for and then I would take that and give that to somebody like you? Yes.
Clark: So, yeah, so you can. So you’re entitled to a copy of it. It’s not going to be available at the accident. It’s going to be generated later, and then it’s going to be, uh, different jurisdictions have different time periods within which they have to, uh, make those reports available. But usually it’s available within a couple of days. And sometimes it’s available in as many as ten, uh, days. And so you can see it and you can look at it. So this is something that comes up in this case you see on the billboards, uh, and TV commercials, uh, no fee unless we recover, right? You see them, you see all the people that do what I do say this. They say this thing where they go, you don’t owe us any money unless we win. You don’t owe us any money unless we recover. And if I’m a person on the outside, I’m like, how does that make any sense? Right? I used to do, um, criminal defense. And you can’t do that there. No money unless you. When my kid. That doesn’t make any sense. So it doesn’t make any sense in divorce. It doesn’t make any sense. Any. Like, how does that make any sense? And here’s the way it makes sense. I can look at a collision report. You know what I mean? Like, when I look at a collision report, I’ve been doing this for 27 years or whatever. And I can see things that you can’t see. So it’s like you see the movie the Matrix, it’s a series of numbers, ones and zeros, and it just. If in the beginning of the movie all he sees is ones and zeros, and in the end of the movie he sees what those ones and zeros tell him, right? Which is an uh, image in a scenario that he can react to and operate within. So if you’ve been dealing with those reports for a certain period of time and the people that we have in our office have been dealing with them long enough to where, like for example, our intake and investigators. Intake investigators, they’re former law enforcement officers. So they’ve investigated hundreds of these, uh, auto accidents. So in addition to the sheet that you get, the four page report that you get, there’s a key that is a two page thing that says the report contains lots of numbers and some of it’s redacted. It’s like crossed out and then. So lots of those numbers mean different things. So you might think you understand the report, but it might have a critical piece of information that’s different from what it should be or different from what you would like for it to be. And so you would want to respond to that quickly because the longer it’s on that report, the less chance you have of getting it changed or finding a witness that may be able to contradict that information. And that can be critically important. If the information, uh, has to do with tire impressions and you wait four months, three months, three weeks to contact us. Guess what’s happened during those three weeks? It’s rained. Those tire impressions are going to be gone. So now when I send my accident reconstructionist out, he’s not going to be able to measure anything because the tire impressions are gone. I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about. This happened, um, a couple of years ago. Father and son are hit by a commercial vehicle. The accident report says that the father, uh, and son pull out in front of a commercial vehicle and the vehicle smashes into it. Uh, well, the guy says, uh, that wasn’t, that was not what happened. But he contacted us within days, within, within hours. Right. So we were able to go out to the scene. And when I went out to the scene, I could see very clearly that when you looked at the scene you could see because, because the, the guy had driven through a yard. So, so what happened was my guy pulls up this, the intersection is. So there’s a intersection like this my guy pulls up to here, and then he starts to pull up to here, but stops. And then the guy coming from the other direction in the commercial vehicle thinks he’s going to pull out. He doesn’t pull out. He thinks he’s going to pull out, um, because he inches close to the highway, but not into the highway. And then he’s speeding, so he loses control and veers off the road into my guy. So he hits my guy when my guy is completely out of the road and pulled up to the stop sign. But he just anticipated this guy’s going to pull out in front of me. It was incorrect, but that’s what he thought was going to happen. And he lost control of his vehicle, went off the road and hit my guy, and then he drove my guy’s car through someone’s front yard. Those tire impressions told a different story than what was on that police report. If that guy had waited a week to tell me to call me, the person whose house it was would have easily repaired his yard and that m. And we would have never been able to recover in that case, because the police report now we were able, because he called me quickly, I was able to download the black box data off the vehicle, off the commercial vehicle, off my guy’s vehicle. It showed my guy will stop. This guy was going, he’s speeding. Shows how much he was going five seconds before. And I was able to get pictures through my investigator of the yard that showed very clearly that this other driver went off the, off the, uh, road and hit my client. And the point of that is now, instead of it being my guy’s fault for pulling out into the roadway, we were able to show, no, that’s not what happened. The other driver thought he was going to pull out in the roadway, even though he didn’t lost control and hits my guy. And so that was a situation where a child had to have a series of operations, broke his back and had to have a series of operations. And, uh, we were able to recover a substantial amount of money to help that child deal with the medical, um, and physical and financial challenges he’ll have going forward.
Carson Grace Toomer: Okay, so is there anything else that people should keep in mind when, you know, resolving a personal injury claim?
Clark: Sure. One thing that people need to be aware of is the concept of liens. You know, so, for example, whenever there’s a resolution, uh, to a claim and there’s money exchanged, like the insurance company pays a certain amount of money to the, uh, injured person, the injured person has to be care. This is Another reason why people need to work with lawyers to resolve these things is because whether they know it or not, there’s probably a lien against those proceeds. A lien is money that you’re legally obligated to repay. So for example, if your health insurance paid, or if Medicaid or Medicare paid, or if there’s medical providers have not been paid, then there’s money that you may legally be responsible for paying back. And so you got to be real careful. Sometimes that money, the amount of the lien may be, especially if people resolve claims by themselves, may exceed the value of whatever you’ve negotiated with the insurance company. If you’re not aware of these liens, that’s another place where if adjuster may not tell you about it because they’re not necessarily, uh, it’s not in their best interest necessarily to cover this and they’re not responsible for this. That’s not their job, you know. But you have to be aware that these liens exist. Now once we, if we’re involved in a case and we can identify these liens, see which one of them are, you’re legally responsible for paying back, and then, um, and then maybe even negotiate them down and we do that on a regular basis. Our job in a, in a, in a personal injury case is to look at it like it’s a little business, right? Uh, and we look at each case like it’s a business. And so we want to maximize the revenue of that business and minimize the expenses, the repayment of liens and costs and whatever, and medical expenses or whatever is an expense. We want to try to minimize that, but we want to be able to resolve those in such a way that they’re no longer. That you’re no longer responsible for paying those back. And so liens become very important in the world, uh, of personal injury in terms of satisfying or eliminating these liens from your future being a future problem for you. Awesome.
Carson Grace Toomer: Uh, well, thank you, Mr. Speaks.
Clark: 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.
