Accident Reconstruction
Preventable Fall Leads to Severe Injury
This animation shows how a well-configured gangway can reduce fall risk, while a hazardous setup can cause serious injuries. It compares a safe design with a gentler slope and non-slip treads to a dangerous one with a steeper angle and no traction, illustrating how a loss of footing can lead to a fall and knee injury.
Hazardous Gangway Design Causes Preventable Fall
An animated comparison of safe access design, hazardous conditions, and the fall that followed.
This legal animation examines a preventable fall on a gangway used to access a docked vessel or platform. It begins by showing the safer configuration, where the gangway is set at a lower angle and fitted with non-slip treads to promote secure footing. The animation then contrasts that design with the unsafe condition, where a steeper incline and missing traction create a serious slip hazard. It concludes by demonstrating how the fall occurred and the severe knee injury that followed.
The safe configuration shows the gangway positioned at an approximate 20-degree angle and equipped with non-slip treads along the walking surface.
Under those conditions, the plaintiff is able to descend with stable footing, maintained traction, and controlled movement.
The unsafe configuration shows the gangway at a steeper approximate 25-degree angle without adequate non-slip treads.
As the foot contacts the smooth surface, traction is lost, balance is compromised, and the fall sequence begins.
The injury sequence illustrates the forces transmitted into the knee during the fall, resulting in severe knee trauma and damage to the supporting structures of the joint. It also shows how the uncontrolled motion leads to additional impact as the body strikes the lower surface and surrounding components.
Accident Reconstruction
Accident reconstruction is pivotal in discerning causation. More often than not, the plaintiff and defendant disagree on the events that led up to an incident. There are a few ways to reconcile potential differences, but the strategy you use will depend on a variety of factors.
Some of these are: what happened, whether or not it was avoidable, what the opposition is willing to admit, what experts you’re able to retain, and the evidence your experts are able to find during discovery. With these in mind, it’s possible to create an animation that depicts the scene of the incident with incredible precision.
Legal Animation for Accident Reconstruction
You may ask why a legal animation would be helpful when reconstructing an incident. The answer is simple. Animations demonstrate liability by showing that a collision could have been avoided if a certain party avoided negligent behavior. For example, without the use of a visual aid, it would be challenging to depict to a jury the exact location of a vehicle in reference to a place they might have never been.
Oftentimes, we find that the facts in a case are complex and challenging to understand for the average person. In a society that is inundated with visual media, it’s critical to be able to teach them the ins and outs of a situation in a way that they’ll be able to understand. If you’ve heard somebody say “I’d have to see it to believe it,” then you know the extraordinary value of providing a visual display for the jury in order for them to understand.
Mark Dombroff says it best: “The varied uses of courtroom visual aids are limited only by your imagination. Legal graphic consultants and artists can be an important part of your team, in helping you highlight salient points, increase comprehension, illustrate the unknown and hard-to-imagine, permit audiences to digest large amounts of data quickly and easily, increase critical events in an evidentiary chain, add dramatic effect [and] make your presentation effective.”
Legal Graphics Help Jurors Decide
Jurors are more likely to sympathize with your client’s injuries when they see that the defendant’s actions were blatantly negligent. Adjusting points of view allows jurors to evaluate a driver’s actions from multiple angles. We work with such precision that our animations have actually been used as substantive evidence, not just demonstrative.
In our extensive experience developing crash reconstruction animations, we’ve done trucking collisions, multi-vehicle collisions, low-speed spine injuries, motorcycle collisions, and many other kinds of incidents. We perform FARO scanning, topographical mapping, forensic analysis, and nighttime visibility studies to determine the precise circumstances under which the incident occurred.
Fox Animation Engineering - Industry Leader for Legal Graphics
Our industry-leading legal graphics have been used by some of the top attorneys in the country. We’re able to achieve this level of excellence because our engineers are the animators. We have certified medical illustrators, medical practitioners, and 3D modeling engineers that collaborate together to create our state-of-the-art animations.
