The connection between the extent of property damage and injuries

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Hello everyone. This is Robert Mansour and I'm broadcasting today from my office here in Los Angeles, California. I'm a lawyer here, and one of my area's of practice is personal injury.

As a personal injury lawyer, you come to realize certain common denominators, common threads that happen in personal injury cases. And one of the common threads is the correlation between the severity of the property damage and the impression that the insurance adjuster has about the severity of the impact. So if you have very minor property damage to your vehicle, the insurance adjuster is going to think that you are not hurt as a result of the accident.

And when I say minor property damage, I'm not just talking about the amount of the property damage, in other words, $500 dollars, $600 dollars, etc., I'm also talking more importantly about the visual property damage.

So you might have felt a very, very powerful hit when you got hit from behind. However, when you try to show people the impact, they can't see anything. You show them the bumper, it looks fine. And again, it may have felt like a ton of bricks, but if it's not visual and it cannot be visibly seen easily, if people have to squint in order to see the damage, you're going to have a very uphill battle, you know, convincing the insurance adjuster that this was a significant enough impact to cause injury.

Contrast that with a photograph that shows a tremendous amount of damage. The back of the car is totally smashed in. It looks like an accordian. It looks like a bomb went off. Whatever the case may be. But the point is this, if there's a lot of visual damage, the insurance adjuster will generally believe that you were injured in the accident or at least that you could have been injured in the accident.

What is interesting is that there are so many studies out right now that have disproven this. That's disproved the idea that the amount of property damage necessarily correlates to the amount of injury. But the truth of the matter is, that's how most of the people still analyze these cases. That's how many insurance adjusters still view these cases.

So once again, tremendous amount of property damage, the injury is likely. Moderate amount of property damage, moderate injury. Very little property damage or property damage that's very difficult to see, low expectation of injury or no injury at all.

So here's the thing. If you have any property damage, you have to take pictures of that property damage. If there's a closure of the gap between, you know, where the bumper meets the rest of the vehicle, take a picture of that. Try to illustrate as best you can, especially when there's very little damage to be seen.

Even if you have to get under the vehicle to take pictures and show the damage because once again, most insurance adjusters will equate your likelihood of injury with the amount of property damage that you have. You have to be able to capture that in photographs. You can talk about it all day long, but showing people pictures is much more persuasive.

Again, my name is Robert Monsour and I just wanted to shoot this short video today to impress upon you the importance of property damage in its correlation to the assessment of injury by an insurance adjuster.

Thank you very much for watching this brief video. Please call my office at (661) 414-7100 if you have a question regarding your Santa Clarita personal injury case.