How Do Attorneys Investigate Liability in Serious Car Accident Cases?

The pickup came through the intersection on MacCorkle Avenue without slowing, and by the time the officer arrived, its driver had his version of the story ready.

The crash report says you pulled out in front of him. You only remember a green light and a gleaming white grille in your passenger-side window, then nothing until the emergency workers cut your seat belt and pulled you from your wrecked vehicle.

With serious injuries and disputed fault, that report can decide who pays for months of treatment and missed work. It decides how much you recover.

After a car accident in Charleston, it’s only one page in the file. When lawyers investigate serious car accident cases, they test the crash report against everything else: marks on the road, damage to both vehicles, the other driver’s phone records, and his own sworn account.

Some of the evidence that can help you overturn what the crash report says can disappear within days.

What the Pavement Says About That Pickup

Let’s say the pickup’s driver tells his insurance man he braked hard and tried to avoid hitting you. The road can settle that. Locked wheels leave a dark, straight skid, and its length, measured against the grip of that stretch of MacCorkle, gives a minimum speed at the moment that driver hit the brakes.

Most newer vehicles have anti-lock brakes, though, which leave only faint scuffs, but that’s fine.

Investigators read other marks too:

• A curving yaw mark means a vehicle slid sideways.
• The gouge where metal first hit the asphalt notes the point of impact.
• The crushed-in area on your passenger side door will tell how hard the pickup hit you and from what angle.

The other driver’s insurance company will probably hire its own accident reconstruction experts, so the scene has to be measured before the broken glass is swept up. Each driver’s share matters. West Virginia allows a jury to assign some fault to someone not in the lawsuit, such as a driver who left the scene.

Your recovery shrinks by whatever percent of blame gets assigned to you.

The Pickup Can Tell on Itself

That pickup that hit you almost certainly carried an event data recorder, a passenger car’s version of a “black box.”

Federal regulators estimated that about 96 percent of 2013-model cars and light trucks already had an event data recorder. In a crash, it saves how fast the vehicle was going, how far the gas pedal was pressed, and whether the brake was touched in the last five seconds before impact.

It also tracks the jolt of the impact and when the airbags fired. If the driver says he braked, the recorder will either back him up or sink his story.

Under federal law, the data belongs to the pickup’s owner, so retrieving black box data requires the owner’s consent or a court order.

Timing is crucial.

Airbag deployment locks that crash record in place, but a smaller bump that didn’t set off the airbags can be written over by a later one. If the pickup got ‘totaled’ in the crash, the insurance company can recommend that the owner sell it for salvage before anyone gets to the event data recorder.

All of this is why your lawyer will promptly send out a preservation letter. In West Virginia, any party that allows evidence it controls to disappear once a lawsuit is foreseeable could face sanctions in court.

The jury could be instructed to assume the missing evidence would have hurt that side’s case.

If They Were on the Phone, the Carrier Knows When

In 2024, distracted drivers killed 3,208 people in crashes across the country, according to NHTSA. West Virginia prohibits drivers from even holding a phone, so a driver texting at that light was also breaking state law.

The driver’s cell phone records can be accessed through discovery or a subpoena to the carrier.

They show when the driver’s phone made a call, sent a text, or used data. Those times get lined up against information on the event data recorder’s clock and the 911 call log. Judges tend to limit the scope of the information request to just the minutes before and after the crash. It takes a court order or the other driver’s consent to search their phone.

Video evidence can be decisive, but it’s important to grab it fast. For example, the gas station near the intersection where your crash happened runs cameras that record over themselves on a loop. A dashboard-mounted camera in a car stopped at the light might hold the only neutral angle anyone has.

The thing is that someone has to request that footage in writing before the loop rolls over and erases it.

The Driver Answers Under Oath

Months later, the pickup’s driver answers questions under oath while a court reporter types every word. By then, your lawyer has the phone records and the event data recorder information, so “I braked” has to square with data that might say otherwise.

The officer who investigated the crash scene gets deposed too. Having arrived after the crash, the officer built the initial crash report from what drivers said at the roadside, and the deposition sorts out what the officer saw from what was only repeated.

Suppose the pickup belonged to a contractor and the driver was on a job.

In that case, it’s a commercial vehicle, and a liability investigation could bring in the company. Your lawyer can question a company representative about how the driver was hired, trained, and scheduled. That’s why deposing witnesses pays off in car accident lawsuits.

Every answer they give goes in a transcript. A witness who changes their story at trial has to square it against the earlier version of the story, and they have to do it in front of the jury.

Build the Case the Crash Report Missed

A report written at the roadside can’t carry an entire case about lasting injuries.

In West Virginia, any share of fault that lands on you or on someone outside the lawsuit comes out of your recovery.

Hendrickson & Long, PLLC, has the experience and resources to secure crucial evidence while it still exists, starting before the gas station’s camera loops back around.

If the other side is blaming you for a crash you didn’t cause, reach out to our firm for a free consultation. Bring the crash report number and your insurance information, and write down where the nearest cameras were while you still remember.