EP04 S01: How Facebook can HELP your Personal Injury Lawsuit

“Stay off of Facebook. You don’t want to be on Facebook, make it private.” But when you think about it, if you have a truly injured client, it might be the exact opposite. Why would a client want to be on Facebook? Listen to our new episode to discover why!

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 Full Transcript:

Welcome to Trial Stories an informative discussion of civil justice with a focus on the human story. I’m your host. Arkady Frekhtman a New York City trial lawyer passionate about helping serious injury victims and their families.

Hi everybody. My name is Arkady Frekhtman. I’m a personal injury trial lawyer at F&A Injury Lawyers here in Brooklyn. We have an office in Bedford Stuyvesant, and I’m here in the Bensonhurst, the South Brooklyn office right now. And I wanted to talk about one of the ways that an attorney and the client can work together to really maximize the results on a case, on a personal injury case. And it involves Facebook because oftentimes a lawyer will tell the client, “Stay off of Facebook. You don’t want to be on Facebook, make it private.” But when you think about it, if you have a truly injured client, it might be the exact opposite.

Why would a client want to be on Facebook? Well, if a client is truly injured, for example, if a client was doing a wide variety of activities like cycling, jogging, and that’s documented in Facebook videos, in Facebook photos, if they were going out and dancing and that’s documented, and this is all before the injury. But after the injury, the client’s life has changed and that client can now get his or her Facebook friends to testify that this person would go out clubbing and go cycling and go mountain climbing, whatever it is. And now that the client is bedbound bedridden, doesn’t work, is stuck at home, can’t really do much more than go for a walk of one block. That evidence is actually extremely powerful because now you have evidence that’s going to come in at trial from Facebook, it’s date-stamped, you could show videos, you could show photos.

You could have some of those people that are your close friends, come into court, and testify. If you can’t get them to come into court, perhaps you could take their deposition and you could read their transcript, or you can take a video deposition and play that to a jury at trial. So now you have really powerful evidence and I’ll give you an example. There was a case where somebody was claiming a brain injury and what they did was at trial they asked their dry cleaner to come to court and the dry cleaner totally won the whole case for them. The dry cleaner said, “I know this guy before this particular injury, he was giving me stock tips. He was a really smart guy, but after this injury, he could barely count the change. I had to count the change for him when he brought in his dry cleaning, he couldn’t even do it correctly.”

And that was so powerful the jury knew right away, this person as a dry cleaner wasn’t a friend, wasn’t a family member. He’s not going to lie for this client. He was telling the truth. And so it was such powerful evidence that it resulted in a multimillion-dollar verdict. And that’s exactly the way that a lot of lawyers should be preparing their cases. And, a lot of clients should be thinking in terms of giving their attorney information, such as their photo albums, pictures from their iPhone that are relevant, Facebook, Instagram, whatever platform you use to really show a change in your life from what you were before the injury and how you are now after the injury. The insurance company is not your friend. The insurance company is a business that wants to pay as little money as possible to sweep it under the rug and get rid of it. They just want to collect premiums and payout as little as possible.

It’s our job, my job, as an attorney representing you, an injury victim, it’s our job. We have to work together to really show your story, show the client’s story. And I think if we explain it properly if we have all these independent witnesses if we have Facebook evidence, if we have Instagram evidence, iPhone photos, photo albums if you’re old school. The more we have the better. And what I do is I go to my client’s house and I look around, I walk around and I ask questions. Recently I was in a client’s house and the client’s sleeping in a bed and it’s not in the same room as her husband, and she’s been married to her husband for 30 years. So I asked her, “Why are you not sleeping in the same room?”

And she says, “Well, I need an adjustable bed. I have to sleep this way with the bed diagonally. And my husband, he can’t sleep diagonally and our house is small and the rooms are small. Only one bed fits. So we have to sleep in different rooms.” I would have never known that if I hadn’t come to her house, if I hadn’t sat at her kitchen table if I hadn’t asked her to give me a tour of the house, so that’s so important as well. So the more you can get to know your clients, the more the client can interact with their attorney, the better results you’re going to have.

I hope this has been helpful. Thank you so much. Please leave a comment. Subscribe to our podcast, we’ll be happy to provide more information. We’ll be happy also to answer your question and we’ll be happy to shoot new videos in response to the most popular questions.

So feel free, please ask questions. What do you want to know? Thank you so much and have a great day. Bye-bye.

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