Personal Injury Claims – How your Facebook Page Can Adversely Affect your Claim

Personal injury claims are a messy business. The insurance company’s lawyers will dig through all your evidence…but it won’t be solely the information you submit with your claim. They will also comb through all the information that they can find on you. And in today’s social media-crazed society—we make that very easy for them.

So—our advice for our clients making personal injury claims—stay off Facebook. If the pull is too strong, at the very least sit down with us and allow us to instruct you exactly how your social media accounts need to be manicured to withstand a personal injury claims attorney combing through them.

Personal Injury Claims—How your Facebook Page Can Adversely Affect your Claim

There are a number of ways your Facebook page and other social media accounts can result in a reduction or dismissal of your claim:

  1. Photographs

Photographs of you participating in activities that are counterintuitive to your claim can severely damage you. There’s no proof like a photograph. The problem with social media is that even if you don’t add photos of yourself—other people can. You need to carefully control who is allowed to ‘tag’ you in photos, and consistently check your Facebook for photos that you are tagged in. If at all possible, speak with your friends about your need to, temporarily, keep your face off Facebook (and other social networking sites).

  1. Stranger Danger

Insurance companies and lawyers know how to ‘catfish’. They can, and do, pretend to be someone they are not and set up a fake profile. They then communicate with you in order to gather information and to have access to your social profiles. Exercise extreme caution while adding new friends on your social network, all throughout the claim process.

  1. Tags

On Facebook, someone can tag you in one of your status posts, without your knowing. Be aware of this and set your notifications to alert you every time someone mentions you in one of their status updates.

  1. Overall Profile

Before making a claim, go through your social profiles with a fine-toothed comb. Remove any suggestions of impropriety. This involves ridding your Facebook and other social profiles of dangerous behaviour, drinking and anything else that could be seen a punitive to your character.

  1. Financials

If your personal injury claim states that your injury has caused you financial hardship then they will be looking at your social profiles for indications that you’re financially stable. Keep this in mind during all your social media activities.

  1. Family and Friends

It won’t only be your social profiles that they look at. Your family and friends’ profiles will also be under scrutiny, so go over their profiles as well and ask them to remove any negative information.

  1. Internet Use

There have been cases where opposing counsel subpoenaed internet records. Be careful what you search, even if it isn’t social-media related. An internet-usage subpoenaed can also be another workaround to get your Facebook information that you’ve set to private. This means that even the ‘private’ settings aren’t 100% guaranteed to keep your information private.

Knowing what to remove and monitor on your Facebook and other social profiles is difficult—as many claimants do not know exactly what they are looking for, and all the types of information that can damage their case. For a thorough examination, call the expert personal injury claim lawyers at Conte & Associates.

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