Evidence and documentation after a crash

More than 6.18 million police-reported crashes happened on US roads in 2024, and most involved property damage or injury rather than a fatality.¹ In nearly every one of them, what happens in the hours and weeks afterward decides whether an injury claim succeeds. Insurance adjusters don't work from memory or good faith. They work from records: the police report, the photos, the medical chart, the repair estimate, sometimes even the car's own internal data. If you don't build a matching record, the adjuster's file becomes the only version of events anyone argues from. That's true whether the disagreement is about who ran the light, how bad an injury actually is, or what a totaled car was worth the day before it was hit.

This guide covers what to gather after a crash, why each piece matters, and where the rules shift from state to state. It's written for the scene itself and for the weeks that follow, when most of the evidence that will decide a claim either gets created or quietly disappears.

At the scene: what to capture before it disappears

Once everyone is safe and any needed medical care is underway, the job becomes documentation. Vehicle positions, skid marks, and debris fields tell an accident reconstructionist things a written statement never will, and they change the moment cars get moved or a tow truck arrives.

A few things are worth doing immediately, camera in hand:

• Photograph all vehicles from multiple angles, including damage close-ups and wide shots that show the whole scene, plus license plates, traffic signals, road markings, weather conditions, and any visible injuries.
• Get names and phone numbers for every witness, not just the other driver. People who saw the crash rarely stay easy to find for long.
• Photograph the other driver's license, insurance card, and registration rather than copying the numbers by hand. Texas's own accident guidance points out that most people don't have a pen and paper handy right after a collision, so a photo is faster and more reliable.²

Write down your own account of what happened while it's fresh: speed, direction, weather, and anything the other driver said. Memory degrades faster than most people expect, and a note written the same day carries more weight later than a recollection reconstructed for an insurance interview months down the road.

If a dashcam or a nearby business's surveillance camera might have caught the crash, note that right away. Many systems record on a loop measured in hours or days, and footage nobody requests in time is often gone before a claim even gets filed.

The police report isn't the final word

The responding officer's report becomes the backbone of most claims, but it isn't a legal finding of fault, and it isn't always right. States set their own thresholds for when a report is mandatory. Texas, for example, requires drivers to file a report themselves using form CR-2 when a crash involves injury, death, or more than $1,000 in property damage and no officer completes one at the scene.² Other states use different dollar figures and different forms, which is one of the first things worth confirming for your own state. Every state also feeds its individual crash reports into NHTSA's national crash databases, which is how a figure like 6.18 million gets calculated in the first place, but the underlying reports themselves stay a state and local record, requested state by state.¹

Getting a copy afterward usually means a request to the state DMV or public safety agency rather than the local police department. Virginia, for instance, routes crash reports through a statewide system and charges a modest per-copy fee for anyone involved in the crash or their authorized representative.³ Processing times of a few days to several weeks are common nationally, so request the report early even if you're not ready to file a claim yet.

Once you have it, read it for errors: wrong vehicle position, a misspelled name, an insurance carrier that's changed, a description of the impact that doesn't match the physical damage. Most states allow a supplemental or amended report, but only if someone catches the mistake and asks.

Medical records: the paper trail insurers actually read

Adjusters and, eventually, juries decide how badly someone was hurt largely from the chart, not the person's account of pain. Continuous, well-documented treatment supports a claim in a way that gaps in care undermine, even when the gap is just about money or scheduling rather than recovery.

You have a federal right to your own records. Under HIPAA's access rule, a healthcare provider generally must give you copies of your records within 30 days of a request, with one 30-day extension allowed if they explain the delay in writing.⁴ An attorney handling a claim will typically use a signed authorization to request the same records directly from providers, along with itemized bills.

If the at-fault party's insurer or, in a lawsuit, the defense wants its own medical opinion, expect a request for an independent medical examination. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 35 and its state-court equivalents let a court order this kind of exam once a party's physical or mental condition is genuinely at issue in the case, with the requesting side covering the cost and the examiner producing a written report of findings.⁵ It isn't independent in the sense of neutral. It's ordered by, and usually paid for by, whoever is contesting your injuries.

The vehicle itself: repair estimates, valuations, and black box data

Property damage documentation runs on its own track. Get a written repair estimate, ideally more than one, and keep every invoice, parts receipt, and rental record. If the car is declared a total loss, hold onto anything that supports its pre-crash value, since valuation disputes are common and states don't all use the same formula to set actual cash value. Even a fully repaired car can be worth less afterward simply because it now carries a collision history: a separate diminished-value claim that turns on the same documentation, the estimate, the repair invoice, and the vehicle's condition and mileage before the crash. Insurers are also bound by baseline claims-handling standards: the NAIC's model Unfair Claims Settlement Practices Act requires insurers to adopt reasonable procedures for prompt, fair investigation of claims, and most states have adopted some version of it and empowered their insurance department to enforce it.⁶

Modern vehicles also generate their own evidence. An event data recorder, the "black box," captures data like speed, braking, throttle position, and seatbelt use in the seconds before and during a crash, under federal performance standards set out in 49 CFR Part 563.⁷ NHTSA recently expanded what that window has to capture: starting September 1, 2027, EDRs in new vehicles must record 20 seconds of pre-crash data at 10 times per second, up from the old 5-second, 2-times-per-second standard.⁷ That data belongs to the vehicle's owner or lessee, not the manufacturer or anyone else, under the Driver Privacy Act of 2015, and it generally can't be accessed by another party without the owner's consent, a court order, or a narrow set of other exceptions.⁸

The catch is timing. If the vehicle gets repaired, sold, or scrapped before anyone downloads that data, it's usually gone for good, which is exactly why acting fast, or getting an attorney involved early enough to request a download or send a preservation notice, matters more with EDR data than with almost anything else in a claim file.

Preserving evidence before someone else destroys it

The law calls it spoliation when evidence that should have been kept gets lost or destroyed, and the duty to preserve it kicks in as soon as litigation is reasonably anticipated, which for a crash is essentially right away. The Fourth Circuit's decision in Silvestri v. General Motors Corp. is the case most often cited on this point: a driver's own experts inspected his wrecked car, but nobody preserved the vehicle or told General Motors it existed before it was repaired and sold. By the time GM learned of the claim, the car was gone, and the court dismissed the lawsuit as a sanction.⁹ The lesson runs in both directions. A trucking company, a store with surveillance footage, or an insurer can face real consequences for letting evidence disappear, but usually only if someone puts them on formal notice first.

That notice is what a preservation letter does: a written demand identifying specific evidence and telling the recipient to keep it intact. Attorneys often send these within days of being retained, which is one reason waiting weeks to get an attorney involved can quietly cost a claim evidence it can't get back. For evidence that lives on computers or servers, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(e) sets out what a court can do when that kind of information is lost, including telling a jury it can assume the missing information was unfavorable to whoever failed to keep it, when the loss looks intentional.¹⁰

Recordings and consent rules

Federal law lets anyone record a conversation they're personally part of without telling the other person, since 18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(d) only requires one party's consent.¹¹ A number of states set a higher bar and require every participant's consent before an audio recording is legal, California and Illinois among them, so a phone call with an adjuster or the other driver may need to stay video-only or get everyone's agreement first, depending on where you are. Video without sound raises no consent question anywhere in the country. If you do have dashcam footage, pull it and save a copy immediately: most units record on a loop and overwrite older files automatically, often within hours or days.

Your social media footprint

Assume that anything posted after a crash can end up in front of an adjuster or opposing counsel, privacy settings included. New York's highest court addressed this directly in Forman v. Henkin, ordering a plaintiff to turn over private Facebook photos and messages, reasoning that the material was reasonably likely to be relevant to her claimed injuries regardless of her privacy settings.¹² Courts elsewhere have reasoned the same way: the question is relevance to the claim, not whether a setting says private. If you do have photos or video from the scene, keep an untouched original file rather than an edited or resized copy. Timestamps and location data on the original can matter later, and an edited version invites questions about what changed.

The practical point is simple. Don't post about the crash, the injury, or activities that could contradict what you're claiming, until the matter is fully resolved.

Wages and out-of-pocket costs

Lost income and expenses need their own paper trail, separate from the medical file. Useful documents include:

• Pay stubs from before and after the crash, or a letter from your employer confirming missed time and rate of pay, plus tax records or 1099s if you're self-employed.
• Receipts for mileage to appointments, prescription co-pays, over-the-counter supplies, and any home help you had to pay for that you'd normally do yourself.

A simple, dated log of symptoms, missed events, and daily limitations, kept as you go rather than reconstructed later, tends to carry more weight than memory alone once months have passed.

How much time you actually have

Every state sets its own statute of limitations for a personal injury claim, and the range is wide. Kentucky gives just one year under KRS § 413.140.¹³ Maine gives six years for most civil claims under 14 M.R.S. § 752.¹⁴ Most states land somewhere in between, commonly two or three years, and the rules can shift further depending on the injured person's age or when an injury was reasonably discoverable.

The practical point for evidence purposes is that the filing deadline is rarely the real deadline. Witnesses relocate, footage gets overwritten, and vehicles get repaired or scrapped long before a state's statute of limitations would ever force the issue, so the clock that actually matters starts running the day of the crash.

Working with an attorney

A lot of an attorney's early value has nothing to do with negotiating and everything to do with evidence: sending preservation letters before a business erases its camera footage, requesting a certified crash report, arranging an EDR download before a totaled car gets scrapped, and getting medical authorizations out before records requests pile up elsewhere. If you're weighing whether you need one, the legal directory lists firms by state and practice focus.

None of this documentation guarantees a particular outcome. What it does is make sure that if the case turns on a disputed fact, there's something other than one person's word to settle it.

This is general information, not legal advice.

Sources

1. NHTSA, "Research Note: Overview of Motor Vehicle Traffic Crashes in 2024," https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813791

2. Texas Department of Transportation, "Crash Reports and Records," https://www.txdot.gov/data-maps/crash-reports-records.html

3. Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, "Request a Police Crash Report," https://www.dmv.virginia.gov/records/request-police-crash-report

4. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, "Individuals' Right under HIPAA to Access their Health Information, 45 CFR § 164.524," https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance/access/index.html

5. Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, "Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 35, Physical and Mental Examinations," https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_35

6. National Association of Insurance Commissioners, "Unfair Claims Settlement Practices Act (Model 900)," https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/model-law-900.pdf

7. Federal Register, "Event Data Recorders" (49 CFR Part 563 final rule), https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/11/28/2025-21506/event-data-recorders

8. Congress.gov, "S.766, Driver Privacy Act of 2015" (49 U.S.C. § 30202), https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/766/text

9. CourtListener, Silvestri v. General Motors Corp., 271 F.3d 583 (4th Cir. 2001), https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/775569/mark-n-silvestri-v-general-motors-corporation-dfendant-appellee/

10. Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, "Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37, Failure to Make Disclosures or to Cooperate in Discovery; Sanctions," https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_37

11. Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, "18 U.S. Code § 2511, Interception and Disclosure of Wire, Oral, or Electronic Communications Prohibited," https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2511

12. Justia, Forman v. Henkin, 30 N.Y.3d 656 (N.Y. 2018), https://law.justia.com/cases/new-york/court-of-appeals/2018/1.html

13. Justia, Kentucky Revised Statutes § 413.140, "Actions to be Brought within One Year," https://law.justia.com/codes/kentucky/chapter-413/section-413-140/

14. Maine Legislature, 14 M.R.S. § 752, "Six Years," https://www.mainelegislature.org/legis/statutes/14/title14sec752.html