Why You Must Avoid Using Social Media If You Have Personal Injury Claim

Years ago insurers paid private investigators to observe the actions of the plaintiff in a personal injury lawsuit. The investigator carried a camera and tried to snap a picture of the plaintiff as he or she performed some allegedly impossible action. The picture could be used to cast doubt on the veracity of the plaintiff’s claims.

Today, insurance companies no longer spend money on private investigators. Instead, they hire someone that has agreed to search for valuable information on a social media network. That is one of four reasons that you must avoid visiting any social media networks, after you have filed a personal injury claim. Here are the other three reasons:

You should not encourage the making of false assumptions

If you decide to share some accident-related facts with a friend or relative, you might post online some pictures of your damaged vehicle. That would seem like a harmless act. How could you damage your claim by posting such images?

If those same images fail to highlight the full extent or the exact location of the damage, an insurer might make a false assumption, after viewing such images. Insurers love to study the pictures posted on social media networks. Any one of them could be deemed worthy of use by a defense lawyer. Any one of them might suggest that the plaintiff did not suffer any severe injuries.

Although it is difficult to prove a negative, insurance companies keep trying to do the impossible. Those companies love to find pictures that seem to suggest the absence of any severe injuries among the passengers in a certain vehicle. Posted photographs make it easier for a defendant’s lawyer to support the argument that has been based on an assumption.

Posted pictures may not agree with specifics in plaintiff’s complaints

Seldom do the photographs posted on a social media network look like the picture of a standing figure. Usually, the picture gets taken when the photographer catches a subject performing an act of interest to Internet viewers. Suppose, though, that the same act relies on use of a movement that the plaintiff has claimed he or she cannot perform. That introduces the type of inconsistency that makes life difficult for the personal injury lawyer in Cornwall representing the victim as the pictured individual.

Time allows for introduction of more inconsistencies

Whenever someone testifies in a courtroom or during the pre-trial process, he or she cannot look at the pictures posted online two or three years earlier. Testimony about recovery from a former injury could differ somewhat from what can be seen in the online postings. A defense lawyer would be eager to spotlight the existence of such inconsistencies.