After a serious car accident, you need compensation and accountability to set yourself on the path to a successful recovery and to turn the chapter on this dark period of your life. If the facts are clear, then you might think that your personal injury lawsuit is going to be a walk in the park. But this isn’t necessarily the case. Even when you can easily prove liability, there are often extensive fights over the amount of recoverable damages.
That’s why as you prepare to go into your case you need to be as fully prepared as possible. While this includes securing witnesses who will testify on your behalf and gathering physical evidence, you should also consider the value of keeping a journal.
How a journal can help your car accident personal injury case
Those who are injured in a car accident are often so busy dealing with the ins and outs of their recovery that they don’t stop to think about how they’re documenting their accident’s impact on their life. Here are some ways that a journal might be able to help you in that regard:
- Detailing your non-economic losses: Non-economic damages are those that pertain to pain and suffering, loss of enjoyment of life, and disfigurement. Since the extent of these damages is subjective, it can be hard to put your losses into words, especially when you’re doing so months or even years after your wreck. By keeping a journal, though, you can maintain a real-time portrait of your pain, your limitations, and the negative impact that your accident has had on your ability to enjoy your life.
This can serve as a valuable piece of evidence in your personal injury trial. Just make sure you’re being as detailed as possible when making your journal entries.
- Tracking your recovery: Your accident recovery probably isn’t going to be on a smooth trajectory. Instead, you’re going to have ups and downs that can make it difficult to gauge how your recovery is going. By keeping a journal, you can identify trends in your recovery that may be indicative of long-term issues that have a more dramatic impact on your life. Highlighting these issues could be key to recovering the compensation you deserve.
- Centralizing an accounting of your expenses: Although you’ll have medical bills and pay stubs to help show your economic losses, you’ll also have daily expenses that result from your accident that can be more difficult to track. Receipts and invoices pertaining to prescriptions, medical equipment, and even transportation can all flood in. By keeping some sort of journal, you can keep a running tally of these expenses so that you don’t overlook them when it comes time to ask for those damages in your personal injury lawsuit.
- Corroborating evidence: You want the judge and jury to believe your evidence and your witnesses. To strengthen your position in that regard, you might want to have corroborating evidence to back up witness testimony. Your journal can do just that, especially when the testimony at hand pertains to the extent of your injuries and how they’ve impacted your life.
Build an aggressive personal injury case to recover what you deserve
There are a lot of different ways to approach your personal injury lawsuit. You’ve got to pick the strategy that best positions you for success. If you don’t or you walk into your case inadequately prepared, then you risk leaving much needed money on the table. You don’t want that to happen, which is why now is the time to get to work in building your personal injury case, which very well might start with the creation of your personal journal.
