The claimant’s or plaintiff’s chances for winning his or her personal injury case depends on the amount of evidence that gets collected by the legal team that has agreed to fight for the claimant’s/plaintiff’s rights.

That same legal team faces one tremendous challenge.

• It must determine who was negligent.
• Was it the driver or the trucking company? Those are the most likely sources for a demonstration of negligence.

The victim of a trucking accident should become familiar with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). It issues the government’s safety rules and requires the placement in commercial trucks of tools that have the ability to collect evidence, at the time of a collision.

Documents that can supplement the data collected by each truck’s required tools

An accident report is one such document: The authorities that reported to the scene of accident have prepared it. Additionally, the alcohol and drug tests serve as sources of useful documents. FMCSA requires the testing of a truck driver, if he or she has been involved in an accident.

One document has been created by the driver, and stored in the truck’s cab. That is the electronic driving log. The log reveals how many hours the driver has been on the road. It also shows whether or not the driver has taken the mandatory breaks.

One of those documents is called a spoliation letter. It is a request of information, and the lawyer for the claimant/plaintiff prepares that request. The request gets directed to the party that is opposing the lawyer’s client. Sometimes, a personal injury lawyer in Oak Park sends more than one spoliation letter to the party that the attorney’s client has named as the allegedly responsible individual.

Evidence that might be used to support the facts in the documents that have been listed above:

Witness statements: the party that has made the personal injury claim should have obtained contact information from any witnesses at the scene of the collision. Using that contact information, the same party should have met with the identified witnesses, in order to obtain the witnesses’ statements.

A collection of photographs: Some of them should have been taken at the site of the accident. Those should offer information on the road conditions, the features at the scene of the collision, and the position of the damaged vehicles. Ideally, the photographer has managed to take those same photographs from different angles.

Not all of the photographs belong amongst those that were taken in the moments following the collision. Some of them should be ones that would offer important details on the claimed injury. Others, those of damaged vehicles, might have come from an insurance company, at the request of an adjuster.