Every crash that occurs on a public roadway and is investigated by any Florida law enforcement agency is supposed to feature the generation of a document called a Florida Traffic Crash Report.
While Florida’s law enforcement officers — from Police Officers to Deputy Sheriffs to Highway Patrol Troopers — generally do an excellent job documenting crash details and assessing fault, we will occasionally see a narrative by a law enforcement officer that doesn’t seem to add up.
No Need To Panic If A Crash Report Is Wrong
We sometimes talk to potential clients who have received traffic citations, or where officers have assigned blame but have not issued citations, that just don’t make sense to us. Folks are usually very worried that an inaccurate or wrong crash report is going to keep them from receiving compensation in a personal injury.
The first thing that any personal injury plaintiff needs to understand is that traffic crash reports are inadmissible in every civil case. This means we cannot use crash reports in trial to help our clients, but it also means that an inaccurate crash report cannot be used to trial to hurt our clients.
This is not to suggest that crash reports are not important. They clearly are. Crash reports are generally the short-hand way that attorneys, adjusters, and others involved in the personal injury field determine who was at-fault for a crash. But crash reports are really just a first step.
Sometimes Good, Old-Fashioned Investigative Work Is Needed
If we have a client or potential client that is adamant that a crash report is just plain wrong, we frequently conduct our own investigations. We speak to witnesses and visit crash scenes. Sometimes to our own surprise, we are able to uncover enough evidence to also convince adjusters and insurance companies that the crash report is wrong. As a result we have collected many hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years for clients - even when the initial crash report either found our client at fault, or failed to assign blame at all.
In the video above, I describe a particularly interesting case where we were able to turn an initial flat-out denial by an insurance company into a $100,000.00 recovery for our injured client.
If you have been involved in Florida traffic crash and feel like the crash report that was subsequently generated is wrong, call Winter Park personal injury attorneys Kim Cullen and Robert Hemphill at 407-254-4901. Consultations are always free.
