Philadelphia Car Accident Lawyer Blog

As an experienced Philadelphia personal injury lawyer for 30 plus years, I am very much aware that insurance companies are stepping up investigative and surveillance activities. As I have already written, they are thoroughly combing social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Zoom or YouTube. Many defense law firms have been told by insurance companies to set up special investigation units in an attempt to throw roadblocks in the way of people seeking to recover insurance claims.

Private investigators and company investigators are being utilized to conduct video surveillance and field interviews of neighbors. Believe it or not in a recent case, we were aware of a client who claimed he could not have sexual relations with his wife and yet the insurance company followed him to a motel where he was seen entering and exiting a hotel room with a woman other than his wife. Obviously this put an extreme damper on settlement negotiations of this case. To make matters worse, the insurance adjuster threatened that the client’s wife would learn of this situation and videos due to the fact that there was a joint claim for loss of consortium and companionship, including but not limited to lack of sexual relations. The bottom line is if you wish to protect your benefits and be successful in the prosecution of your claim, always remember the Louis Pasteur quote, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

If you or a loved one has been involved in a car accident or premises liability lawsuit or other serious accident, please feel free to contact one of the experienced catastrophic personal injury lawyers at Reiff & Bily for a free, no obligation consultation.

More and more in contentious litigation, we are receiving requests from defense counsel concerning our clients’ Facebook identification and the news and information posted on their sites. Of course, we strenuously object to the same arguing that it is a violation of privacy. However, it seems to be that we are getting more and more discovery requests for Facebook and social networking information accounts such as MySpace, Twitter, or other sites. Such accounts reveal information regarding an individual which is highly personal. However, access to the user is limited to persons who obtain the user’s permission, which permission is only obtained after the user is approached online by a person seeking access.

As a Facebook user, I regularly receive requests from individuals who I don’t know seeking access to my account and as chance favors the prepared mind, I refuse access to those individuals. Any social networking sites contain information relevant to legal claims that can be used to impeach testimony at trial. Many times, individuals give access to their sites to anyone who asks in a competition to have more friends.