In serious injury cases, one of the greatest challenges is helping jurors, judges, and the defense attorneys and insurance companies truly understand the full extent of how an accident has impacted a client and their family. Attorneys use multiple methods to make this clear, including commissioning day-in-the-life videos.
Day-in-the-life videos follow a client over the course of a typical day, highlighting the problems and challenges caused by his or her injuries. These powerful videos invite jurors, defendants, and other relevant parties in a case to witness the struggles a seriously injured plaintiff confronts on a daily basis firsthand. Learn more about how day-in-the-life videos have helped the attorneys at Block O’Toole & Murphy make their clients’ situations visible — and how we ensure they’re admitted into evidence, even if the defense tries to object.
In This Article:
- How Day-in-the-Life Videos Are Made
- Challenges of Making a Day-in-the-Life Video
- Admitting a Day-in-the-Life Video Into Evidence
- Case Study: How a Day-in-the-Life Video Helped Secure a $32,756,156 Jury Verdict
How Day-in-the-Life Videos Are Made
While a day-in-the-life video is meant to support your case, it won’t be admissible as evidence if a judge sees it as biased or manipulative.
Our attorneys hire professional videographers to film and edit their day-in-the-life videos. This isn’t just about ensuring a high-quality product: it’s about making sure that the video has been created by someone with no financial stake in the success or failure of your case. The videographer’s mission is simple: he or she must follow the client over the course of a typical day and use the resulting footage to create a video reflecting the day’s events. We don’t tell videographers to dwell on the saddest or most unpleasant aspects of the footage they’ve captured, nor to attempt to determine what will hurt a defense. This would be both unethical and unnecessary: the clients whose everyday lives are captured by these videos suffer from problems that, once revealed to a courtroom, speak for themselves. All the videographer needs to do is observe.
Challenges of Making a Day-in-the-Life Video
It’s important that day-in-the-life videos capture a typical day. If the subject of a video deals with an immediate medical emergency, while perhaps probative, that’s not a typical day. Other factors — for example, unexpected visitors, medical complications or loud construction next door to the building where our client lives — could interrupt the flow of the client’s routine. Sometimes, the videographers we hire have to go back more than once.
Of course, the presence of the videographer may represent a challenge in itself. People tend to act differently when they are being filmed or recorded, which is why cameras are usually banned in New York State courtrooms. We encourage the videographers we hire to be as unobtrusive as possible.
In many cases, this is not an issue. Caregivers don’t have much opportunity to be distracted by the presence of a camera when they are preoccupied with the needs of clients who may require their help to eat, navigate a room, or go to the bathroom. Clients themselves are similarly focused on an existence that requires every ounce of physical and mental effort. The most badly affected clients may not be aware of the videographer at all.
Admitting a Day-in-the-Life Video Into Evidence
Once a day-in-the-life video has been completed and edited, a new challenge arises: getting it admitted into evidence. Because these videos can be powerful and effective if done the right way, just about every defense will try to argue that it should not be part of the evidence in the case. They will argue that such videos are inflammatory and intended to prejudice the jury. They will often question the integrity of the video, contending that it may have been deceptively edited, or that our team might have coached participants off-camera.
The videographers we retain are professionals with experience in making similar videos, and they have a process. If a video is challenged, we call the videographer as a witness. The videographer walks the judge and jury through each step of the process to help them understand that the video was made accurately and without manipulation.
Case Study: How a Day-in-the-Life Video Helped Secure a $32,756,156 Jury Verdict
A day-in-the-life video proved critical in one of our largest cases, which, at the time it was resolved, was the largest negligence result in Long Island history. Our client, a 56-year-old father and grandfather, stopped to help the victims of a three-car accident. While he was providing a statement to the police, a car driven by a heavily drug-impaired person crossed the barrier and hit our client. The car continued to drive with our client on its windshield; a bystander had to jump into the car and throw it into park.
Because our client was completely blameless in his accident, partners Stephen Murphy and Daniel O’Toole, who handled his case, knew that the court result would favor him. But they also knew that an ordinary result would not be enough. Our client, who required 24-hour nursing care, had lost his freedom and his power of self-expression. His family had lost a husband, father and grandfather as they once knew him. Unable to form new memories or take care of them, he had become a shell of the person he once was.
Murphy and O’Toole used a day-in-the-life video to demonstrate how their client now needed help with the smallest of tasks, and how he required significant speech therapy to use even the slight amount of language he was still capable of. They didn’t just rely on the video, but supplemented it with reports, testimony, and photographs from family and friends of our client — evidence that conveyed the active and vibrant man he had been before the accident. The starkness of the contrast between the man depicted by this evidence and the man seen in the video was not lost on the jury, who awarded a $32,756,156 verdict, ensuring that he would receive the care he needed for the rest of his life.
If you or a loved one has been injured in a serious accident, the attorneys at Block O’Toole & Murphy are here to help. Block O’Toole & Murphy has achieved landmark results for clients throughout New York and New Jersey, including $110 million and $53.5 million jury verdicts. Reach out to one of our seasoned attorneys for a free legal consultation.