I recently spoke at TASA about something I think personal injury lawyers should be paying much more attention to.
The client’s phone.
Not because we’re looking for some dramatic text message that wins the case. Usually, that’s not what we’re going to find.
What we may find is something better: a record of ordinary life.
Where someone went. Who they talked to. What they were doing. When they stopped doing it. Pictures they took without thinking about litigation. Work messages. Calendar entries. Notes. Receipts. Contacts. Sometimes years of little digital breadcrumbs that nobody created because they expected to need them as evidence someday.
That’s precisely what can make them valuable.
This is the third piece in a series I’ve been writing about the things that can shape a personal injury case long before anyone starts talking seriously about settlement or trial.
The first was about evidence that disappears.
The second was about why cases shouldn’t be treated as “settlement cases” from day one.
This one is about evidence that may already be sitting in your client’s hand.
Start With The Camera Roll
Ask someone what evidence is on their phone and they’ll probably think about text messages.
I usually think about photos.
Scroll through someone’s camera roll from the year before a serious injury and you can learn a surprising amount about that person’s life.
There might be pictures from vacations, children’s sporting events, nights out with friends, home projects, workouts, weekend trips or just ordinary Tuesday afternoons.
Then comes the injury.
Keep scrolling.
Sometimes you can actually see life getting smaller.
The trips stop. The golf pictures disappear. There aren’t as many photos from the kids’ games. The person who was always doing something is suddenly spending a lot more time at home.
Does that prove an injury?
Of course not.
But it may help tell a story that medical records alone can’t tell.
A medical chart can document a shoulder injury.
It can’t necessarily show you what that shoulder injury meant to the person who used to pick up his daughter, work on his house every Saturday or play softball twice a week.
The phone might.
What Were You Doing At 4:17?
Phones can also help with something much more basic: reconstructing a timeline.
Serious accidents are chaotic.
I’ve represented people who can remember certain moments with incredible clarity and have almost no memory of others. That’s not particularly surprising. They weren’t taking notes. They were living through an emergency.
Months later, lawyers start asking very specific questions.
When did you leave?
Who did you call?
Where have you been?
When did you first tell somebody you were hurt?
Did you take a picture?
Who else was there?
Now pick up the phone.
There may be a call at 4:17 p.m. A text at 4:22. A photo at 4:28. A map search. A rideshare receipt. A message to a spouse. A call to a supervisor saying you won’t make it to work.
Individually, these things can look trivial.
Put them together and sometimes you have a remarkably good timeline created by the person before anyone told them a timeline would matter.
That’s the kind of evidence I like.
The Witness You Forgot About
Here’s another common problem.
“Who was there?”
The client gives you three names.
Six months later, you’re looking through something on the client’s phone and another name appears.
“Oh, right. She was there too.”
People forget people.
Phones don’t always forget them.
A group text, contact, photo, call history or old message can help identify someone the client hadn’t thought about since the day of the incident.
That person may turn out to know nothing useful.
Or she may have seen exactly what happened.
You don’t know until you find her.
This is one reason I don’t think reviewing a client’s phone should mean hunting for one particular piece of evidence. Sometimes you’re trying to understand the ecosystem around the event.
Who was this person talking to?
Where were they?
What was happening in their life?
What changed afterward?
The answers may lead somewhere useful.
Work Lives On Phones Now Too
This has become especially important as the line between our phones and our workplaces has disappeared.
People text their bosses.
They get schedules through apps.
They receive work emails on their phones.
They communicate with customers. They photograph job sites. They keep calendars. Gig workers may have an enormous amount of their working history inside an app.
So when someone tells me an injury affected their ability to work, I don’t think only about tax returns and pay stubs.
Those documents matter.
But there may also be a much more immediate record.
A text saying, “I can’t take the shift tomorrow.”
A calendar that suddenly empties.
Messages asking coworkers to cover jobs.
Customers being rescheduled.
An independent contractor turning down work.
Again, none of these things necessarily proves the entire damages claim.
Evidence rarely works that neatly.
But it can corroborate what the client is telling you, and corroboration matters.
There’s Another Side To This
I can’t talk about phones and personal injury cases without mentioning the obvious problem.
The defense can be interested in them too.
Social media is the easiest example.
If someone claims she can barely walk and then posts a video of herself running a 10K, that’s going to be a problem.
But the issue is broader than telling clients, “Don’t post anything.”
I don’t like giving clients cute tricks for litigation. I want them to understand something much simpler.
Tell the truth.
Don’t exaggerate what you can’t do. Don’t minimize what you can do. Don’t try to manufacture a version of your life for a lawsuit.
And don’t start deleting things because you’re worried about how they might look.
If there’s something on the phone that concerns you, tell your lawyer.
I’d much rather learn about an uncomfortable photograph from my client than from opposing counsel at a deposition.
The phone isn’t automatically the plaintiff’s evidence.
It’s evidence.
Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it hurts. Usually, the lawyer needs to understand what’s there before deciding what matters.
Don’t Turn Your Client Into A Digital Crime Scene
There is a balance here.
A client’s phone may contain years of intensely private information that has absolutely nothing to do with the case.
The answer isn’t to vacuum up someone’s entire digital life because some portion of it could theoretically be useful.
You need a reason for what you’re looking for.
If the question is the client’s physical activity before and after an injury, look for evidence relevant to that.
If it’s lost income, focus on work.
If it’s the timeline surrounding a collision, reconstruct the timeline.
If you’re trying to identify witnesses, look for people connected to the event.
The goal isn’t more data.
It’s better evidence.
That’s an important distinction.
The Evidence We Create Without Knowing It
For most of human history, ordinary people didn’t keep detailed records of their ordinary days.
Now we do.
We just don’t call them records.
We call them texts.
Photos.
Calendars.
Apps.
Receipts.
Searches.
Messages.
Phones have quietly become diaries that we never intended to write.
For lawyers, that creates enormous responsibility. There are privacy issues. Discovery issues. Preservation issues. Context matters enormously. One isolated text or photograph can be misleading if you don’t understand what came before or after it.
But it also creates an opportunity to understand a client’s life in a way that wasn’t possible a generation ago.
Medical records can tell me what happened to someone’s body.
Employment records can tell me what happened to their paycheck.
A phone may help me understand what happened to their life.
And in a personal injury case, sometimes that’s the story we’re really trying to tell.
Amanda Demanda, Esq., is the founder of Amanda Demanda Injury Lawyers and a nationally recognized trial attorney with a focus on serious and catastrophic commercial truck accident litigation. She currently serves as President of the Miami-Dade Trial Lawyers Association. She has built one of the most visible plaintiff firms in the country, with offices in Miami, Tampa, Houston, Dallas, and throughout Florida and Texas, allowing her team to handle high-stakes cases across key transportation corridors. Known for blending courtroom skill with strategic insight, Amanda brings a people-first, safety-driven approach to complex trucking and personal injury cases, with a focus on accountability and real-world impact.
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