We have covered what some of the most common questions we get from those in car wrecks in San Antonio. Whether injured or not, car crashes create a lot of uncertainty and questions for those in them. We do our best to address some of the most common questions and considerations.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill law firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

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On the Hill Law Firm cases podcast, we've been going through a series of real-life questions that we get asked from clients or family members or friends following a car crash. When people are in car crashes, they often think the first thing I'm going to do is call the police and sometimes the second thing I'm going to do is call an attorney.

We've all been conditioned to know that at the end of the day, insurance companies are going to do whatever they can to deny or delay our claims. It might be clear as day that we're not at fault, but the insurance company is going to find some way to say we're at fault. People know that they want to call an attorney to make sure they don't do anything that shoots them in the foot later on or allows their insurance company to have some loophole to deny their claim.

Two of the more common questions that we get that I always tell people they shouldn't be stressed about are can I move my vehicle and what should I do about witnesses? The first question is a pretty common question we get and it's something that the police and public media is often discussing and that is can you move your car? If you've been in a crash, should you move your car to the side of the road? We always tell people to follow with the San Antonio police department says, if you call the San Antonio police department, they'll tell you what the best thing to do is.

Normally they tell people that if it's not an emergency situation, the cars are operable and you can safely do it, to move your car to the side of the road to allow traffic to get through. Otherwise, you might be causing a traffic jam that keeps police or ambulance or fire from getting to your vehicles.

We always tell them to listen to the police, listen to the 911 operator, whoever you're talking to on their advice. Generally, what they say is that if the vehicles are operable, that you can safely do so, to get your car to the side of the road to allow traffic to continue to flow and to not create another danger for other drivers.

The second question we get is, should I take down a witness's information? It's very common. We get clients that come see us a couple of weeks after a crash and say, "Yes, there were witnesses. I saw them there and they told me they would help me if they could," but nobody took down their information. What we see a lot is that the police officers will take down their information, but it's not part of the police report and we never see it again.

Sometimes police reports will have the name and phone numbers of witnesses and what they said, but more often than not, our clients will tell us there were witnesses to the crash that they spoke to, but that those witnesses are not in the crash report. We always tell people that if you have witnesses that saw the crash, take down their name, take down their phone number.

If you can do a little video or audio recording with them at the scene, that's great too. The important thing is we want to know how to get in touch with them at the end of the day because when the other side's insurance company is going to start blaming you or trying to say it's 50, 50, the most powerful evidence against those frivolous defenses are third parties with no skin in the game who saw the crash and will honestly say what caused it.

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