Accident vs. Crash: Using the Right Language to Win Your Personal Injury Case

If you want to win your personal injury case, it's important to start noticing the language your attorney and adjuster use so that you can begin to understand the subtleties of meaning.
You may not realize it, but it's very important that you use exactly the right words when describing your personal injury accident. You do not want to jeopardize your case by mistake, due to your own ignorance of the correct way to refer to your accident.

The best example of this is the difference between the words crash and accident. The word accident implies that there is no at fault, that the whole incident was a mistake with no one to blame. But this is not true - in most cases, there is someone who was acting illegally or negligently that caused the collision and the injury to the other person.

Instead of using the word accident to refer to the incident that injured you, use the words that more fully describe what actually happened; car "wreck," car "collision," and car "crash" all imply fault and therefore are more useful to you in your personal injury case.

In personal injury, one of the biggest factors of winning a case is proving liability. Adjusters will use terms like accidents to show the jury that the at-fault driver was in fact not at fault, but your attorneys should use the terms that will show the jury the truth - that the "accident" was actually a "crash" and that the at-fault driver should be held responsible.