The critical importance of good photos

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Hello everyone. This is Robert Mansour. I'm a personal injury lawyer in the Los Angeles area. Today I want to talk about something that I've talked about before but I think it deserves some more more attention. That is the issue of taking very good photographs of the damage to your vehicle after a car accident.

I'm talking about when I say good photographs, these photographs have to be designed to illustrate the severity of the impact. Let me repeat that. The photographs that you take should be designed to illustrate the severity of the impact. Let me give you an example. I had a client that came to my office and they showed me the back of their car and there was some damage to it. I said, "Okay, that's fine." But it really didn't look all that bad.

I told them, I said, "To be honest with you this doesn't look all that bad and an insurance adjuster is really not going to think much of it." They said, "Oh, well if you look at the trunk inside, the floor is crumpled. And also where the lock sits in the trunk, it's all bent inward." I said, "Did you take pictures of that?" They said, "No we didn't think that we had to." Well the answer is that you have to.

The insurance adjuster's job is to adjust your claim. By adjusting your claim that means usually that they take your claim and they make it smaller. After more than 21 years of practice I have not really seen a lot of adjusters take your claim and make it bigger. Usually their inclination is to make it smaller.

I tell my clients, I say listen, tell me about the damage. They say well the trunk wasn't sitting right or it was misaligned and it was misshapen and there was a gap between the rear quarter panel and the side door. I said did you take pictures of any of this?  No, we just took this one picture of the back of the car.

So when I tell clients that initial thing that I just said which is when you take photos take photos designed to show somebody that this was more than just a minor impact. The pictures have to tell a story. Sometimes clients don't take pictures at all. When you do take pictures, and you should, always imagine the insurance adjuster sitting on your shoulder doubting your case, thinking that it was a minor accident. You know, their client, the one who hit you is most likely going to say well it wasn't that big of a deal; it wasn't all that bad.

When you take your photos you have to take them with that in mind. You have to take them with the idea that you are going to need those to persuade the other side that there was more to this than meets the eye. You see when I look at my clients photographs I'm the lawyer and I'm supposed to help them and I look at the photograph and I'm like well it doesn't look so bad to me. Then they had to explain to me that it was worse than it actually was and then we learned that there was a lot of things that they didn't take the picture of.

The purpose of today's video is to understand that when you do take photographs, and you should, of the damage to your vehicle, take photographs designed to persuade the adjuster that this was more than a minor fender bender. Now in some cases that's not going to be a problem, there's so much damage all the windshield is broken and it's really not a big deal. But in the more subtle cases where there was a strong impact, but it's hard to tell, one of the ways that you can do that is by taking very good photographs of the damage to your vehicle.  I hope you found this video helpful. My name is Robert Mansour. Thank you very much for visiting.