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ChatIf you were in a motorcycle accident, you want to do everything you can to help your case. Preserving important evidence is essential. This means you should keep your motorcycle intact and not let it out of your possession without your lawyer’s involvement.
What Happens Following a Motorcycle Accident
In order to prepare a claim to the insurance company for your motorcycle accident, your lawyer will need to investigate all important physical evidence related to the accident. Physical evidence includes things like your motorcycle, the roadway where the accident occurred, other vehicles involved in the accident, your clothing, and other objects at the accident scene. Your lawyer may even have an expert on accident reconstruction look at your bike to prepare your claim.
Following an accident, insurance companies often ask to take your bike to a “collision center” for review and repair. It is in your best interest to say no to this request and let your lawyer handle when and how the bike will be repaired or declared a total loss. You have the right to the auto body shop of your choice for repairs. And your lawyer may need to inspect the bike even before it is repaired. An experienced motorcycle accident attorney can help you handle all of these details, from repair shops to medical treatment, so that you are fully informed of your legal rights and receive fair treatment.
The Importance of Preserving Physical Evidence for Case
If you were in a serious accident, you may end up in a court case against the insurance company if the company denies or underpays your claim. Both Rhode Island and Massachusetts courts prohibit destroying evidence that is relevant to a case. When important evidence is destroyed or missing, courts can penalize the party who should have kept the evidence, making it much harder to win the case unless there is a reasonable explanation for the destroyed or missing evidence. Courts can do things such as tell a jury to assume the missing evidence would be not have been helpful to the party — called an adverse inference. Courts can prevent parties who destroy or lose evidence from testifying about the evidence. Courts can even dismiss a case against the party whose evidence is missing or destroyed.
Because of the importance of physical evidence like a motorcycle, you should keep it and all physical evidence from your accident in the same condition it was in when the accident occurred. This means not letting anyone, including the insurance company, look at or take your motorcycle without your lawyer present.
Motorcycle accidents require fast action. Contact Mike Bottaro and his experienced legal team as soon as possible about your motorcycle accident to learn about your legal rights and begin the process of healing and getting the compensation you deserve.