Technology is a spectacular thing. No matter which way you look at it, it’s always growing, advancing, and changing. It may cause headaches for those who don’t feel “tech-savvy,” but when approached correctly, it can open up a whole new world of possibilities for so many industries and people.
At Finney Injury Law, we’re no strangers to the wonder that is technology. Aside from keeping up a spiffy, informative website, updating our avenues of communication with all our clients, and always making sure our in-office systems are running smoothly so we can work on your cases efficiently, we use technology in the courtroom to the best of our advantage. That means when you become our personal injury client, we’re using it to the best of your advantage too. How’s that, you might ask? We’ll give you an inside look.
Bosch Data Retrieval
Bosch is a top-notch tech company when it comes specifically to Event Data Recorders (EDRs). And if you’re wondering what, exactly, an EDR is, it’s that special machine you sometimes see mechanics plug into the computer underneath your car’s dashboard to run diagnostics on what might be going on under the hood. Only when it comes to Bosch’s EDR, it goes way beyond checking for low oil levels or a burnt-out headlight.
We won’t get too technical, but when you use an EDR on your car or the responsible party’s car after it’s been through a crash, what it’s really doing is performing CDR—that’s Crash Data Retrieval. In other words, the Bosch box our firm uses can gather nearly pinpointed information on exactly what the car was doing before, during, and even after the crash to some extent. That includes things like GPS location, speed, and sometimes even maneuvers made, like braking.
Why is this important? Because it gives us an inside look at how each car involved in your car accident was behaving just before the crash. That means it’s really giving us an inside look at how the driver might have been behaving just before the crash. It’s a fantastic piece of technology that we can use to help prove that the driver who caused the crash might have in fact behaved negligently, thus giving your claims an even stronger leg to stand on. Most personal injury firms don’t keep this piece of technology on hand, meaning they have to ask specialists to perform checks, which can take weeks and be costly. Because we have one of our own, we can perform CDR at-will and at no additional incurred fees.
Medical Animations
For the most part, the average-Joe doesn’t have extensive knowledge of injuries and medical procedures. And you know what very important group of people largely consists of average-Joes? The jury in your personal injury trial. Though you and our legal team might have an intricate understanding of exactly what kinds of injuries you suffered in your accident, as well as the procedures you’ve had to go through to get them fixed, the people of the jury can’t always grasp things the same way. That’s even true when you’re giving them the facts straight off the report from the doctor themselves. So we like to create medical animations that visually show the jurors what our client’s injury consisted of, and what had to be done to address it.
Medical animations are tasteful, professional videos that do their best to avoid being gruesome, while still communicating the severity of all the harm that has been caused by the liable party. But even more than that, they do an excellent job of helping to tell your story. We’ve found that recreating what a severe injury looks like within the body paints a better picture of the damage that had to be done for our client to sustain that injury. And then demonstrating the often painful and invasive medical procedure that was required to help heal the injury goes on to show the jury the additional time, suffering, and costs the victim has had to undergo as a result.
The strategy of creating personalized medical animations for our injury cases that we can then put on a big-screen television to wheel right up to the jury box sets our firm apart from those who don’t have the resources to provide the same.
Timeline Software
Just like medical animations can help the jury visualize how your injuries happened and the painful procedures you’ve had to go through as a result, the timeline-building software we use can give those same jurors the visual cues they need to better understand where to place liability in your case.
We’ve sat through far too many personal injury trials in which the defendant’s legal team attempts to confuse the jury by throwing out seemingly random claims, times, dates, and actions revolving around their client’s behavior as it pertained to the accident. They’ll even go after our client if it means they can muddle the timeline of events further! But once again, we’ve found that when we create a visual timeline for the jury to follow, they face less confusion and more clarity about what precise steps led to the defendant causing the plaintiff harm.
Aside from clearly spelling out who was where at what time, and how that helps to prove negligent actions, creating a digital timeline to display on a screen saves an incredible amount of time at trial when compared to providing old-school handouts of printed photos and documents. And when you save on time, you save on the jury’s attention span, too. When used correctly, timeline software helps paint the broader picture of your case and holds the jury’s attention in a way that drives the most important points home.
Video Footage
Playing footage of your accident that was recorded by police bodycams, witness cells phones, traffic cameras, and even security cameras from nearby businesses or residences seems like a straightforward process. But using all this video footage in a way that truly benefits your case is actually a bit of an art form. It comes down to a lot more than just pressing play on each video and letting the jury sit back and watch.
Whether there’s one source of footage in your case or upwards of ten, we know using this special evidence successfully comes down to utilizing each piece of footage to its full potential. That involves likely pouring over dozens of hours of recordings and looking for exactly what we need to prove the negligent harm caused to you. After that, we have to figure out how to display that same footage in a way the jury will also recognize and understand what we’re trying to prove. We can’t expect those average-Joes to always see what we see—so we make a point of showing them.
We use a combination of video footage and special software that allows us to pause, slow down, rewind, zoom in, mark up, and sometimes even enhance footage as needed. It also often involves stringing together several different sources of video into a continuous “film” that helps to tell the full story of what happened to you. Not every courtroom in Missouri is updated enough to offer this kind of technological capability, which is why we always make sure to bring our own setup too.
Embracing technology to its fullest extent has helped us secure some incredibly successful verdicts for our clients. So we plan to explore it and utilize it even further as it continues to advance, and as long as it helps our clients get the justice they deserve.
Posted Under: General, Personal Injury