How Social Media Can Affect Your Personal Injury Case By Sean Burke on July 18, 2016

At the Law Offices of Sean M. Burke, there is nothing more important to us than the rights of our clients. We have devoted our entire professional lives to the pursuit of justice on behalf of those injured by the negligence of others, fighting to ensure that they are properly compensated for their losses and expenses. Led by personal injury attorney Sean M. Burke, our entire team works tirelessly to collect evidence, reconstruct accidents, and protect the privacy of our clients while building the strongest cases possible on their behalf.

In this day and age, however, the protection of our clients’ privacy can be a tricky matter, to say the least. It is difficult enough to keep opposing attorneys and their hired hands from violating the privacy of our clients; however, with the Internet and social media ever present, even our clients can jeopardize their own cases these days, albeit unintentionally. For this reason, we will certainly advise you as to how social media can affect your case when you consult our Orange County, CA personal injury attorney.

Above all else, we want to be sure that we do everything we can to preserve your rights and obtain the full measure of compensation to which you are entitled on your behalf. If you or a member of your family has been injured due to an accident caused by someone else’s negligence, or if you have tragically lost a family member in such an accident, please contact the Law Offices of Sean M. Burke to arrange for an evaluation of your case today.

Anything You Post to Social Media Can - And Probably Will - Be Used Against You

Remember that what seems like a perfectly harmless post - a status update to your Facebook, a photo to your Instagram account - can potentially be used as evidence against you by opposing counsel in court. An event that seems completely innocuous - a visit from a friend, a day on which your pain is not as bad as it was the day before, even a day when you just happened to be in a better mood than you had been since your accident - can be framed as evidence that you were not as injured as you claimed to be if it is open in any way for interpretation. And the problem with social media, as many have learned the hard way, is that nearly every interaction on nearly every platform is open for interpretation by someone.

In the case of defense attorneys, you can bet that they will have members of their team scrutinizing your social media accounts. You may even think that your posts are “private,” but it is best to assume that anything you post on the Internet, regardless of your privacy settings, can be seen by those who truly want to see it. It is best simply not to use social media outlets to communicate while you are pursuing a personal injury claim. In the end, it is far better to be safe than to be sorry.