Joseph L. Walsh Personal Injury Law Blog on Lawyers.com

            Most people think that they are obligated to give statements. You are not obligated to give statements, except to your own insurance company.  With your own insurance company, you are under a contractual duty to cooperate with your insurance company, or risk jeopardizing your coverage if you don’t cooperate.  But people are under no obligation to give a statement to the person that caused the accident or his or her insurance carrier.  Yet many times they do.  They think it’s fairly innocuous; that it’s not a big deal; they’re just going to tell the truth.

            And maybe they’re on medication, or maybe they’re in pain. And the adjusters are calling them during those periods immediately after the accident and they’re asking questions in a way that is designed to elicit potentially damaging information ultimately to their claim.  The insurance adjusters are trained at that; so the client may not realize that they’re being lead down a primrose path, but later on they find out that they were. And later on it makes it difficult for the client.

            So my recommendation would be that, unless it’s your insurance company, you shouldn’t give any statements to anybody unless you are represented by an attorney. They don’t need a statement—a recorded statement from you --in order to evaluate whether their insured is at fault, they can look at the police report and talk to their insured.  They can look at a number of sources to determine whether their insured was at fault. They don’t need the statement from the driver that was the victim of the negligent operation of the vehicle.

            At some point the lawyer may decide that it’s an appropriate time for you to give a statement and then offer their client for a statement.  But the attorney is going to make sure they’re not under the influence of medication; they’re not in such pain; that they’re not under such economic duress that they’re willing to say anything to try to get money in.  Of course, the lawyer will be with you when you give the statement so that he or she can object to any unfair or oppressive tactics and cut the statement off if need be.         

            And so it’s always better to be represented when you give those kinds of statements. Furthermore, you should be limiting the number of statements that you give because the statement that you give to the insurance company can virtually never be used to help you.  It can only be used against you. And if you file a lawsuit, you’re going to have to give a deposition under oath, and 90%, maybe 99% of the people that give two statements about an incident, two separate statements about the same incident, are going to have some discrepancies.

            Not because they’re untruthful; not because they’re trying to change things, but because that’s human nature. And that human nature will be used against them in a court of law because a shrewd defense lawyer will say “oh, you told us this when you gave the statement to the insurance adjuster but now you’re saying this.”

            They’re trying to create the impression that you are less than honest—which feeds into the perception that you are trying to get something for nothing, which all these jurors have in the front of their mind.

            And the defense lawyers are trying to push buttons to reinforce that. And so that’s the jeopardy of giving two statements about the same incident. Because nobody is ever going to give verbatim the same description of the incident two times, particularly when the statements are removed by, many times, years apart.

Joseph L. Walsh III, P.C. 4399 Laclede St.
Saint Louis, MO 63108
888-897-5065

www.josephlwalshlaw.com