The cost of a motor vehicle accident can harm more than your automobile and insurance premium. If serious injury or death occurs, you may experience immeasurable emotional and physical suffering in addition to lost wages and expensive medical bills.

The AAA estimates that car accidents cost $6 million per fatality and $126 thousand for each serious injury. In arriving at that estimate, the AAA considered values placed on the eleven effects of car crashes as determined by the Federal Highway Administration. These eleven effects were:

• Property damage


• Lost earnings/wages


• Loss of household productivity


• Lost time/productivity at work


• Medical expenses


• Emergency response costs


• Vocational rehabilitation expenses


• Legal fees and expenses


• Administrative costs


• Travel delays including highway congestion


• Pain and suffering and loss of quality of life

In 2009, nearly 34,000 people died in car, motorcycle, and pedestrian accidents according to the National Highway and Transportation Safety Administration. That means fatal car crashes collectively cost Americans $204 billion in that year alone. With the astronomical costs incurred from injury or death in a car accident, you should not have to bear the brunt of the financial strain. If a driver was negligent in causing the crash, you can hold them accountable for their actions and collect damages from them or their insurance carrier.

Accidents can be caused through numerous negligent actions including driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, driving while texting or talking on a cell phone, drowsy driving, or doing other non-driving tasks while behind the wheel like reading, eating, or putting on makeup. Drivers who engage in these dangerous driving practices negligently put others at risk and should compensate you for the harm they have caused. A qualified personal injury attorney can help you obtain the compensation you need.

Injuries or death can occur due to vehicle performance issues as well, derived from faulty manufacturing or defective safety mechanisms. In these cases, the automobile manufacturer failed to meet its duty to ensure that your vehicle met certain safety precautions before placing it in the marketplace. Attorneys often help shape the industry standards for safety while at the same time representing clients who were harmed as a result. By hiring a skilled personal injury attorney you can become whole again financially and simultaneously prevent the same harm from occurring to someone else.

If someone has caused you or a family member serious injury or death by driving negligently, seek professional legal advice to evaluate your claim. An experienced personal injury or wrongful death lawyer can investigate your accident to determine the actual cause and the responsible parties, and seek to collect payment on your behalf for the harm you experienced.

I remember distinctly an anti-insurance fraud television advertisement during my childhood that featured a man ripping off a neck brace once he got behind closed doors. The ad also featured the same man complaining of serious neck injuries to his doctor and a non-descript person in a tie, presumably an insurance claims adjuster. After he ripped off the brace, however, the screen panned out to a detective watching the entire scene. For the final act the man was handcuffed, the judge's gavel came down, and jailhouse gates closed. The message was clear, even to a child: "we are out there, we will catch you, don't lie, don't commit insurance fraud." I was an early convert of the insurance industry.

In this digital age, however, the detective is no longer sitting in a nondescript sedan down the block, the detective is on the Internet. And as I have told more clients than I can remember, and will continue to say as long as I practice, the Internet is forever. And never before has the permanence of the Internet become more visible than this past summer in a highly publicized case in the Charlottesville Circuit Court. After a record-setting jury verdict, the defense attorneys in the matter of Lester v Allied Concrete Co. , won a hotly contested post-trial motion on a discovery issue. That is, they felt that the plaintiff and his counsel committed an error to the prejudice of their case by not responding fully to questions or requests for documents during the pre-trial discovery process. The issue here was Facebook. The Plaintiff, Mr. Lester, was alleging serious and continuing injures, but Facebook pictures had allegedly surfaced of him partying without any obvious impairments. A request for the pictures was made but they were abruptly removed from the site. Was that legal?

Judge Hogshire of the Charlottesville Circuit Court said "NO," emphatically. Mr. Lester was slapped with $180,000 in sanctions, his counsel was given additional sanctions, and the two were made responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars in defense counsel attorneys' fees for the forensic examination required to prove that the pictures existed, that they were deleted, and that they were deleted at the direction or with the knowledge of the plaintiff's attorney. My summary is for the purposes of illustrating the point that the Internet is forever and that a plaintiff's conduct is always being watched. If you want an in-depth summary of the events, check out Virginia Lawyers Weekly, it is one of the most-reported cases of 2011.

Facebook is often the example for the Internet gone wild, a largely unregulated platform where freedom of speech reigns. Facebook was not responsible for this plaintiff's behavior. And Facebook is not alone in being a minefield for plaintiffs seeking to exaggerate their pain and suffering. Photo sharing sites like Snapfish, Flickr, and iPhoto as well as messaging providers such as Twitter and Bebo are perfect fodder for posting "private" photos or sending spur of the moment messages, and they allow for a third-party to accumulate substantially more information than most consumers know about. Yes, these sites all have security features, but it is also easy to find so-called private images with any number of photo recognition programs and the investigators can also sign up as members of the services and access unprotected information that way.

A personal injury plaintiff claiming serious and continuing damages for pain and suffering needs to be aware that their claims put their whole lives under a microscope for a claims adjuster and defense counsel. In the digital age, that means a consistent approach to social media like Facebook and Twitter. An injured person who posts pictures of himself dancing the night away or who tweets "Just set a new bench press record" needs to be keenly aware that everyone is watching him and just like medical records, it will all be discovered. My point is two-fold. First, that as a plaintiff you must be honest and forthright with your counsel. Getting caught exaggerating damages is exponentially more damaging to your claim than having smaller damages. Second, nothing in digital and social media is truly private and you must consider that your adversary is always watching. And if the old anti-fraud commercials of my childhood have taught me anything, it is that they are watching, they have resources, and they know how to implement them.

Luckily, I learned that resources and candid advertising, whether it be through public service announcements or talking mascots, were largely directed at shifting the public attention away from the reality that these companies care about the bottom line and shareholders, not the real pain and suffering of the injured. As a Virginia personal injury attorney, I strive every day to bring attention to those that are seriously injured and get them the compensation that they deserve.