What To Do In The First 48 Hours After A Car Wreck From Lawyer Chaz Roberts

The first 48 hours after a car accident can quietly decide your entire personal injury claim. We’ve seen it again and again: the case turns on what gets documented, what gets said at the scene, and what evidence disappears before anyone thinks to save it. So we’re sharing a simple, real-world roadmap you can follow right away after a car wreck, built from 16 years of practicing law in Louisiana.

We start with the foundation: calling 911 and making sure a police report is created, with statements, witness info, and the basic narrative of what happened. Then we get specific about the biggest verbal traps. Saying “I’m okay” feels polite and normal, but insurance adjusters and defense lawyers can treat it like a written admission that you weren’t injured. We explain a better phrase that stays honest while protecting you, and why keeping your story short and factual prevents “distracted driver” arguments later.

From there, we walk through what to do next: taking photos and videos if you can, grabbing witness contact details before they vanish, and getting medical care as soon as you feel anything different than pre-wreck. We also break down urgent care vs emergency room, how ambulance and ER billing can affect a settlement, and why early treatment helps you document injuries while meeting the duty to mitigate damages. Finally, we explain why calling a car accident lawyer early can cut off recorded insurance calls, preserve time-sensitive footage, and make the whole process easier while we handle the paperwork, repairs, rentals, and investigation.

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This show is co-produced by Carter Simoneaux of AcadianaCasts Network, Chaz H. Roberts of Chaz Roberts Law and Kayli Guidry Bonin of Beau The Agency, and Laith Alferahin. 

Transcript

hy The First 48 Hours Matter

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Common misconception. Most car wreck cases aren't won or lost in trial. They're won way before the actual trial takes place. In the precious months right after a wreck, but specifically the 48 hours after a wreck, in my opinion, are the most important moments in the entire trial. That could be the difference between a good case and a bad case. On today's episode of Law Have Mercy, I'm going to give you my roadmap for what to do in the first 48 hours after a car wreck. Valuable information that I've learned in 16 years of practicing law, and that'll put you in the best spot to be successful in your case. First things first, the car wreck happens. Very unfortunate. You're probably on your way to work, on your way back home, and there's a wreck. If the other person is at fault because they rear-ended you, sideswiped you, God forbid, T-bones you had an intersection, you are going to be disheveled. What do you do? You pick up your phone if you're able to and call 911. You want the police to arrive. Okay? The reason why that's so important is because the police prepare a police report. They get statements, they take pics, they can access camera footage. Nowadays there's cameras on every intersection, at least it seems like. They will access that and do a police report and assess fault. Now, that fault is not definitive. There's been plenty of times where the police report got it wrong and I was able to overturn it by gathering my own evidence and conducting my own investigation, but they're going to get the other driver's name, insurance information, get their license, their registration, see if they're insured, and put together a narrative of what exactly happened. They're going to take statements from both sides. They're going to get witness statements. You want that. Now, I've had cases where there was no police report that was prepared. But in that scenario, you really have to be, or that person really had to be their own investigator. Now, luckily, I took the case because that person took pictures of both vehicles, took pictures of the other person's license, got a statement actually on a video of the other person admitting to fault and got their insurance information. So they did the same job, basically, that the police would do. Now, I would not recommend it. Those are very few cases. That's 1% of the cases that I'll take on. You'll see that in parking lot cases as well, because the cops oftentimes don't want to come out or just do an exchange of information because it's a private property, not a public roadway. So they really don't have jurisdiction there. Okay, so you want a police report. Now, when you talk to the police, there's two big things that you have to be concerned with. All right. You want to make sure that you don't tell the cops that you're not hurt or that you're okay. Okay. And I'm not telling you to lie. I'm just saying that you don't know when you're on the side of the road and there's traffic flying by and it's raining and it's 95 degrees in a Louisiana summer if you're hurt or not. Because that pain could set in an hour from now, two hours at night, the next morning. The best thing to say is, I'm going to get myself checked out. All right. So you don't want a statement in writing or from the cop that says, you weren't hurt, you weren't injured. I'm okay. What you really mean is, I survived, I didn't lose a limb. I want to get off this road. I'm okay to proceed. Okay. That's really what you mean. But those words are often misinterpreted by insurance adjusters, by defense lawyers. I hear it all the time. Defense lawyers will question my clients in a deposition. Well, you said you weren't hurt. You said you were okay. Well, yeah, but the pain came in the next day. Pain came in two days ago. So what I'm telling you is it's an unnecessary statement that could create problems in the case. I seem to be able to work around that, but why fight battles we don't have to fight if you just don't say that? Don't say I'm okay. Don't say I'm not hurt. Say I'm gonna get myself checked out. Cool. The other statement that people make is they say too much. I was rear-ended. I was at a stop sign, I was rear-ended. The end. That's all you need to say. Short and sweet. You don't have to talk about what you saw or didn't see. Because if you start talking about pulling out of an intersection and a car hits you, you start saying, Well, I didn't see the car. And I you are setting yourself up to be a distracted driver. All right. So if you're rear-ended, let's just use the rear-ending example, and you start talking about, well, I never saw the car, or I was looking at this um shopping center that's just going up in my neighborhood that I didn't notice before. Why are you saying all those things? You're opening yourself up for arguments that you were distracted, or that you're on your phone, or that you were playing with your radio, or that you were really looking in the distance and you maintain a proper distance in the front and you stop short and they hit you. You're opening yourself up for these things by not keeping it short and sweet. So, to recap, when you get in a wreck, first thing you need to do is call 911. You want the cops there. And when you talk to the cops, tell them I'm gonna get myself checked out and saying I'm okay or I'm not hurt. And the third thing is I'm gonna keep it short and sweet and stick to the facts, not my perception of the facts. Not adding all this additional information because I'm nervous and I'm sweating, I'm just trying to prove that I didn't do anything wrong. The more you try to prove you didn't do anything wrong, the actually worse it is. You want to stay short and sweet and to the point. What actually happened, not your perception of what happened. The next thing you need to do, and this is in the hour or two or three after the wreck, all the way up to the next day. You want to get yourself checked out as soon as you feel pain or discomfort. Now, what is pain? What is an injury? My definition is anything that is different than the way you felt before the wreck. It's not wheelchair pain, it's not cane pain, it's not I need to be checked into ICU pain, it's any pain or discomfort that's different than before the wreck. Because those things, that discomfort, could lead into something much more severe down the road. And we need to document it as soon as possible. There's two real reasons you want to get treatment as soon as possible. You want to document it for purposes later on down the road. That'll help me a whole heck of a lot. But also, you have a duty to mitigate your damages in Louisiana. What does that mean? What is a duty to mitigate? Let's use an easy example. Your roof, all right? Hurricane comes through, punches a big hole in your roof. Are you just going to sit there and look at the hole in the roof and let everything in your house get ruined from rain? No. You have a duty to go out and get a tarp and cover your roof to stop the bleeding, to mitigate the damages. The same thing in a personal injury case. If you could have taken better care of yourself and got the medication you needed or the therapy you needed in a timely manner, then you need to do those things. That's good for society. It's good for insurance rates. It's good for everyone. It's good for you. It's good for you to get yourself checked out and heal as soon as possible. We can't ask for a six-month injury if you'd have taken better care of yourself in month one or two and it'd have been a two-month injury. Does that make sense? You got to put the tarp on your roof. You got to get medical care as soon as possible. And so you have two real options. You can get, you can go to the emergency room or you go to urgent care. Now, I am not a doctor. I hate giving medical advice. I don't give medical advice. I'm not licensed to. But to me, the emergency room, you know it when you need it. If you can't walk around, if you have a head trauma, if you have body trauma, there's any chance of internal bleeding. It was a bad wreck, and you're busted up, and you're not conscious, or you're not, you're not, you know, you don't have full faculties. You don't know exactly what's going on. You're dazed, you're confused. Internal bleeding, any kind of any kind of uh external bleeding that you need to get stitches or anything, go to the emergency room by all means. The only reason I say don't go to emergency room is for minor injuries. The walk around minor injuries, soft tissue injuries that you know is not severe enough to go to an emergency room. I I remember seeing this billboard. If you get stung by a bee, urgent care. If you get stung by the beehive, emergency room. Look, if you have someone there, take a ride to the emergency room. Don't take the ambulance. Ambulance is very expensive.$2,500,$2,700,$4,000 to take an ambulance. Now, if you need to go via ambulance, we will all know. The cop will know, you will know, everybody will know that this is an ambulance case. But I would be lying if I told you that I haven't seen hundreds of cases where that person should not have taken an ambulance because it was a very minor injury. And we owed$2,500 to the ambulance and another$5,000,$7,500 to the emergency room. That person could have gone to a walk-in clinic, brought by their friend to a walk-in clinic and got medication and even some x-rays and saved themselves thousands of dollars because ultimately that money comes out of what insurance is available. And a lot of emergency rooms won't even run your health insurance. They won't run Medicaid, probably won't run Medicare. They'll run Blue Cross. But some hospitals, especially the rural hospitals, don't even want to run private health insurance. They're not stupid. They see the big price tags. They see that someone else is at fault, a third-party fault. And so they use the law to kind of wiggle around and go after the auto insurance money and get full freight, full payment of their sticker price instead of a reduced contractual amount that the insurance company has negotiated, the health insurance company has negotiated. So have I ever had a case where somebody said, we're not paying all this money because that person just went to the urgent care instead of the emergency room? Never. Never. I can I don't remember a single case. And I'm talking about some seven-figure cases where the person went to the urgent care. I've had some seven-figure cases where the person went to a chiropractor their first visit. Didn't even go to emergency room, urgent care. Now, it takes a little bit more uh convincing that they didn't go to the urgent care or emergency room. But what I'm telling you is from the eyes of the law, the urgent care and the emergency room really aren't looked that much differently. Okay. Maybe urgent emergency room, we can argue the severity of the injury, but when it comes to a minor injury, urgent care, emergency room, tomato, tomato. Now, we don't know ultimately how severe that injury is. You could have a herniated disc requiring surgery, neck surgery, back surgery. But we'll find that out down the line. But from the outset, there's really no difference in emergency room, urgent care. Those symptoms, even with a bad disc injury, present themselves very similar to even a minor injury in the days after because of adrenaline, because of swelling, and because of those sorts of things. If you are at the scene of a wreck and you can walk around, you really should try to take pictures and videos of the scene. If you have a passenger or if you have a loved one that comes out to the scene, ask them to take pictures and videos of the scene. If there's any witnesses, try to get their contact information because they may go poof in the night and you'll never get it. Ask the officer to get the witness information. If there's a witness there before the cops arrive and they really have to go to bring their kid to soccer practice, take a quick video of them asking what they saw and their name, their phone number, and their address. That would help us tremendously. We take it all. We want it all. We want to assess it. Okay. So take pictures and videos if you're capable. If you have a severe injury and you're not capable and you're getting strapped up in a gurney in an ambulance, that's understandable. But if you're able to walk around, try to get some evidence. Okay. And so I would put that number two right before the medical care. And I didn't mention that before. I just thought of it. But that's an extremely important thing to do. The next thing you want to do within the first 24 to 48 hours is call a lawyer. Give me a call. You not get in touch with me. 337-504-3202, chazroberslaw.com. Y'all know how to find me. Give me a call. I will give you advice that will help you tremendously. The reason you don't want to drag your feet on hiring a lawyer is because we want to cut off communication between you and the insurance company immediately. Because what you say is on a recorded line and can and will be used against you. You know, when we open a case, there's about 20 to 25 to 30 tasks that we do. And that includes helping you get a rental, help get your car repaired, help you get the best care possible, notify all insurance companies, start investigating the other side, start gathering pictures. We might need to do a download of your vehicle. We might need to get some information from the other evidence gets spoiled. That's a term. Gets spoiled after a while. Maybe there's some dash cam footage. Maybe there's some, maybe the gas station has some footage of the wreck and we need to get it, and their servers reset themselves every two or three days. We want to jump in and get as much information as possible, as early as possible, to put you in the best spot. Well, I can't do that unless I'm hired. So call me. It's going to make your life a lot easier because you won't have to deal with the insurance company. I mean, we have a whole team that all we do is deal with phone calls with insurance companies and send them letters and get this on board. We're a shield and a sword. We're protecting you with a shield, protecting you from yourself, and we're also using the sword to start stabbing them, gathering evidence, getting them to handle their obligation, like setting you up in a rental, getting your car fixed, maybe pay some bills. Right? We want to do that as early as possible. I've had a case, her name was Sherry. She waited and waited and waited. I think she got her first treatment in two months after a wreck. Now, we pulled a rabbit out of our hat. We got her a lot of money, but it was a dog fight. A dog fight. And when we get into a dog fight, we have to spend more money than we want to. That's expenses, and that ultimately comes out the client's pocket. Now, it cost her because she made a misjudgment. So it worked out, and she still was very, very happy with what she ultimately recovered. But why go through all that if we don't need to? If we're educated on the front end, which is why I'm trying to educate you, if we do those things on the front end, we don't have to fight those very expensive, lengthy battles on the back end. My favorite case is a closed case. I want your case closed tomorrow, but I'm not going to close it too soon. But those battles, the time, it interferes with your life potentially, but it costs money. It costs money to take depositions and file things with the court and all that stuff. And ultimately comes out the insurance that's available. You don't pay it out your pocket, but it comes out your settlement. Same thing. I treat my clients' money like I treat my own money. And that's I try to pinch pennies where I can so I can put the most money possible in their pocket. So if you do these things right on the front end, you will be so much more successful on the back end. Don't wait. All right. And to recap, we want a police report, call 911. We want photos and videos if you're physically able to. If you're not, do you have a friend or a family member at the scene who can gather these things? We want medical care as soon as possible. You know the difference now between urgent care and emergency room. And we want to get involved as soon as possible as your lawyer so we can protect you with our shield and we can start stabbing them with our sword so we can fight for you. I hope you learned what to do in the first 48 hours. This comes from 16 years of experience. I've seen it all. And I know this is the right advice. Hope you have a great day. Hope you enjoyed the episode.