I've had an accident, what do I do

Some general thoughts

-First try to call (or have someone call 911)- you may need the police or EMS services. If you are hurt, do not be shy about seeking medical care.

-Be thoughtful about moving the cars before the police arrive- that might alter the proof regarding determining who was at fault, or to a lesser extent, injury. Also, there might be local or state laws prohibiting movement of the vehicles before the police arrive. One should also be somewhat suspect of an at-fault driver's request to move the vehicles. Just give extremely careful thought to your actions regarding any movement of the vehicles before the police arrive. It is probably wiser to wait for the police.

-Buy a disposable camera and throw it in your glove box. Immediately after the accident, if it is safe and practical to do so (and you are physically able), consider taking pictures. Take pictures of the vehicles, the surrounding area, the roadway, traffic control signs and lights, and if there are homes on the sides of the street shoot that as well. It is nice to confront a witness who claims to have had an unobstructed view and states he/she saw the collision from his or her front porch. When you show them pictures of trees in full bloom totally obscuring the line of sight, the jury tends to question the credibility of such a witness. A picture of a long skid mark might detract from somebody claiming to be driving well under the speed limit. Bear in mind however, if you go on a full blown photo spree, this could impact proof on your own injuries.

-Call your insurance carrier immediately and report the accident.

-Try to get the insurance information of the other vehicle. Try to get the name and contact information of the other driver & any passengers. Usually the police can do this for you and it might be wise to wait for and rely upon the police. I would caution against having much in the way of a conversation of any substance with the other driver as you might end up in a "he said/she said" situation later on. It is usually fine to ask about injuries, the need for EMS or police, and to exchange identities & insurance. Beyond that, I would recommend caution.

-If you want, you can talk to the other driver's carrier. I would suggest that you consider limiting initial conversations to confirming that the accident occurred, identify the vehicles, whether police came, and to discuss insurance carrier information. Caution is advised beyond this. You might want to seek legal advice before talking to the other drivers carrier, or before going much further that these topics. Always give thought before giving recorded statements to the other driver's carrier.

-Resist the urge to blindly blurt things to the police (or the other driver) and bare your soul. You might be injured and are probably not in the best frame of mind to assess who was at fault (if anybody was) and you are probably are not well versed in determining liability, which is typically more a legal determination. There are also issues of apportionment of liability that might come into play. The last thing a Plaintiff's trial lawyer wants is for the opposing driver to testify that "he [the Plaintiff] literally jumped from the car and said I'm so sorry, it was all my fault."

-If you are hurt, promptly seek medical care if you feel you need it. Do not be surprised if you start to really hurt a day or two later, or even a week. Just bear in mind that the longer you wait to get medical treatment, the more difficult it can become to tie that medical treatment to the injuries from the accident. Track you medical providers and bills that you feel are related to the accident. Get a separate folder for this material.

-If you have questions, call a lawyer. This discussion provides only generic considerations. It is not meant to be nor is it advice for your own case or situation, nor is it meant for you to exclusively rely upon. There are thousands of lawyers out there, and most will talk to you for free. My office always provides free consultations. We handle injury cases on a contingent fee basis, meaning we do not get paid unless and until the case is resolved. It is nice to get involved early on so that there are fewer fires to put out down the road. Contingent fee cases require written contracts of employment and legal representation can commence only after such a contract is executed.

I was told I have a "soft tissue" injury- what does that mean

First, there is an acronym called MIST- Minor impact Soft Tissue. The major impetus for Plaintiffs and injured drivers (& passengers) is that it is unlikely that you were seriously injured if you were involved in a minor impact collision, and/or all you have is a "soft tissue" injury. The easiest way to think of soft tissue injuries is that there are no broken bones, not much blood, no frankly herniated discs, no joint dislocations, etc. Classic strains and sprains are a decent example of soft tissue injury- the soft tissues (or more appropriately, the connective tissues) of the body are injured. Obviously, depending on how your body responds to the forces generated in the collision, an injury s may or may not have occurred.

Second, there is term called "delta v". It stands for change in velocity (or speed for the technically inclined since velocity is a vector quantity having both magnitude and direction and what we are interested in here for simplicities sake is what most people call speed). Anyway, good old fashioned Newtonian physics tells us that in a simple car accident, as between the two vehicles, there is generally an going to be an exchange of energy, and a corresponding change in velocity (or speed) of the cars. This change in velocity is called "delta v." There is literature out there that would suggest that many defense "experts" claim that a delta v less than 5 miles per hour in not going to cause much in the way of bodily injury, meaning the occupants probably were not injured despite whatever damage was done (or not done) to the vehicle. These experts tend to rely at least in part upon Insurance Institute for Highway Safety [IIHS] crash test data. However, these are usually staged tests under controlled environments. Some of the tests are performed by running a car into a rigid barrier. Question: is this the same as to cars of different makes and models in varied states of repair, traveling on any given street atany given time, and then colliding at an obtuse angle with neither driver expecting a collision. The answer is no, and the experts are not always correct.

Consider another important element of a collision- the crash pulse. A very simple way of looking at this is to ask how long the collision took (in terms of the change in velocity/speed, or the exchange of energies). Please note we are usually talking in fractions of seconds here. Anyway, the longer the crash takes, the more time in which the forces are spread out, and the less "intense" the forces will be at any one instant in time. Less force usually equals less damage, and less injury to the occupants. So, many experts sometimes conclude that since in many car-to-car collisions, crash pulses are longer (as compared to the rigid barrier crash tests), the delta v in a car-to-car collision is usually lower than the delta v in a rigid barrier collision. And we all know that lower delta v's means less injury (well, maybe). Presumably you can see where this is going.

The net result is that as between car-to-car collisions, a higher delta v may well be needed to cause residual vehicle damage (again as compared to a collision into a rigid barrier). However, it is easy to set up the math to show that even with minor damage or even no bumper damage in a two car collision, a vehicle occupant experienced almost the same "delta v" as the car that the IIHS drove into the rigid barrier (and lets assume that the vehicle in that test had significant bumper damage). The difference is that there was a lower force experienced in the car-to-car crash (recall it took more time), hence less visible damage.

There is also a concept of a BEV, or Barrier Equivalent Velocity, which very simplistically, more or less tries to mathematically model or extrapolate what kind of collision it would take as between two cars in order to generate the same degree of damage (or eventually, delta v) as found when driving a car into a rigid barrier. As you can imagine, this is not all that simple. Some experts eventually end up equating BEV to delta v for a given collision, and then claim it was under 5 mph, hence no injury. Conceivably, this could occur in a situation where the two cars involved in rear-end a collision have identical weights and the "stiffness" of the rear bumper of the lead car is the same as the "stiffness" of the front bumper in the second vehicle. While this is only one example, and there are no doubt others, the point is- how often does this really happen. We can also get into just how "stiff' are the bumpers on the car, and what crash test data is out there for collisions under 10 mph, etc.

By the way, why does a "delta v" under 5 mph mean little or no injury- Because years ago some company called the Biodynamics Research Corp ran some studies on willing human test subjects in car accidents (ask yourself- who paid for the study, who owned this company, where did they get the test subjects, how were the subjects compensated, were the test subjects employees, how healthy were these subjects, were the test subjects all healthy males, were the subjects braced for the collision, were they restrained, were the headrests all properly set at optimum height to resist collision, were the collisions all straight into another object or did the car strike an object at some odd angle, etc??).

Anyway, the result was that the test subjects had only minor injuries in collisions with a delta v under 5 mph. So, some carriers relied upon this and began to scrutinize certain types of low speed collisions. Plaintiff's lawyers have attacked this "study", and many times have done so quite successfully. The net result is that with effort, it can be argued that delta v is not a really a "holy grail" as an all encompassing threshold for injury. To really look at the forces incident on a car, we need to look at a number of factors including safety features on the car, the collision itself, the make, model, and state of repair of the cars, etc.. What we are really asking, is what were the forces incident on the vehicle, what forces were transferred to the occupant(s) of a vehicle, could these forces have caused injury to the occupants, were the occupants in fact injured, etc. This involves as much engineering as medicine/anatomy- it is not simple. Many car accidents simply do not warrant a full blown engineering style studies. It can be a massive undertaking and quite expensive on all parties.

To be certain, vehicle manufacturers design in safety features and they can minimize human injury. The point, is, every accident has unique set of circumstances and each accident deserves some individual analysis and the attention needed to evaluate the legal & medical issues. Blindly using threshold criteria for occurrence of an injury does an injustice to all parties.

Consider an unexpected collision at just about any speed, and bear in mind that the fact the human spine is not a model of perfection in terms of damage tolerance. Further, do not lose sight of the possibility that the cervical spine is probably not engineered to resist motion from the incidence of sudden, intense forces. So, after a collision, we can end up with pain and injury. Here is a simple at home test if you are healthy- take a milk jug that is full, hold it over your head and wave it around. Do you feel the force/torque in your hand & wrist.

Consider in a simplistic fashion that the human head more or less sits on top of the cervical spine. In a collision, it can be "whipped" around in various directions in very short periods of time. The neck can be subject to a variety of forces at different instances in time: sheer, tension, compression, moments, are a few of the types of forces. Are the supporting structures of the cervical spine ideally designed to resist such unexpected forces coming from odd angles and at different magnitudes, and thereby mitigate against injury. The answer is probably not. Is the brain itself well insulated by anatomic structures to avoid injury from sudden intense movement-maybe. There is the phenomenon of brain cavitation, and very simply, we are talking about subtle movement of the brain tissue that can cause injury in & of itself. Consider also- Was the head rest on the car seat properly positioned to limit the motion of the head & neck? Hyperextension or hyperflexion can occur.

This discussion was designed to raise your awareness to some of the issues Plaintiff's lawyers face. The horrific car accident where limbs are broken is easy to establish injury. They are also more rare than the more typical "rear-ender" where the driver of the lead car experiences significant head & neck pain, or even some low back pain. The point is that you can be injured in even a minor collision, and if one wants to get into the trenches with the defense experts, a skilled lawyer (e.g. one with an engineering degree or two) can put up a dramatic fight. To be sure, there are no guarantees of any result, and some economies of scale must be considered by the lawyer before engaging in this type of advocacy.

A final word, if you feel you are injured, even in a low impact collision, seek medical attention. We would all like to see people "made whole" after an accident, if possible. Unfortunately, this cannot always happen.

As always, this discussion is not intended to provide specific legal advice. You should not rely upon any of this unless a qualified legal professional has indicated doing so is appropriate for your own situation. Please seek competent licensed counsel for your unique fact situation, and do so in a prompt and timely fashion.