Top 9 essential things you should do if you are in a Car Accident
Collecting Essential Contact Information
To establish an insurance or personal injury claim, you need to be able to present your evidence in a substantial and convincing manner. In order to do this, you will need to exercise diligent fact-finding in order to gather essential information regarding your accident. Some information required includes the names of the other driver(s) involved, their addresses, phone numbers, emails, their insurance information, and license plate numbers.
You should also diligently try to get the make and model of the other vehicle(s) involved. If you think that the other drivers involved in the accident are not the actual registered owners of the car, you should also try to find out who the registered owners are; get their names, addresses, phone numbers, and the status of their insurance. Keep in mind that insurance companies may not acknowledge your claim without the full names and identifying information of those involved in the accident.
Other people you should interview include other passengers, pedestrians, and any witnesses. Witnesses are very important to establish your injury claim since their testimonial evidence can support and corroborate your own version of the incident. If you have found a potential witness on scene, try to get their name, address, phone number, and email.
In your inquiry, you should try to document if anyone actually took responsibility for the accident, as well as the visible damages to each vehicle. Try to take complete notes of conversations made after the accident because these can be helpful later in establishing your claim. For the other parties involved in the accident, you should try to write down their respective positions and who in particular they are blaming for the accident. It is also important to get the contact information for the police that arrive at the scene.
Remember that the goal of getting all this information is to establish either your insurance claim or your personal injury claim, and to find out the proximate cause of the accident or identify the negligent individuals responsible for the accident. Having this in mind, you should be very careful if other parties try to illicit pertinent information from you as well since they might use the same against you as evidence later in court. Be especially careful not to admit that you were at fault, or give out essential details that you feel are not necessarily related to the car accident.
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