Obtaining Photos After A Fall

Obtaining Photos After A Fall

Transcript: Hi, I’m Indiana personal injury attorney David Holub, and this video discusses the importance of getting photographs of the condition which caused you to fall in a fall situation.

One minute you’re shopping, and the next minute you’re on the floor.

One minute you’re walking through a parking lot, and the next minute you’re on the ground. You call for help and a manager comes over, and, in the case of falls inside of a store, they clean up the spill and take an incident report. Most of the time, nobody takes a photograph of what caused you to fall. It’s not usually in the best interest of the store manager to create a photograph that presents evidence of a dangerous condition on a floor.

We’ve had cases where photographs were actually taken by a grocery store manager, and then later were destroyed, and when we asked in deposition, “What happened to the photographs?” The manager just said, “Well, they weren’t in our favor, so we didn’t save them.”

So it’s critical that you, or you have a family member, or a witness get a photograph of whatever condition caused you to fall, whether it’s a spill in a store, or a pothole in a parking lot, you need to get a photograph.

A case that we recently handled involved a person who fell in a parking lot in a pothole. The individual’s sister had the presence of mind to take a couple of photographs of that pothole after her sister fell. Those photographs proved to be critical because the day after the fall, the shopping center people patched the pothole and when we filed suit they claimed that there never was a pothole–that there was nothing that would have caused anybody to fall. Luckily, our client had photographs of the condition which resulted in the fall.

Today, with cell phones, almost everyone has an ability to take a photograph, and if you’re hurting so bad that you can’t feel like you can take a photograph, hand your phone to a friend or a witness who was there helping you–let them get a photograph of the condition that caused your injury so that evidence is available.