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Accident Reconstruction
Wrong Reaction to Collision Avoidance System
If you’ve driven a vehicle with a crash avoidance system, you know that this can be highly convenient, and can make a sincere difference as long as the driver is paying attention.
However, if the driver is distracted, and knows only that there is an obstruction in the road, it’s possible that the driver reacts in a harmful instead of beneficial way. In the case depicted in this animation, the driver put her turn signal on; and then the vehicle indicated that there was an obstruction.
The driver assumed the obstruction was in the right lane, and the vehicle was telling her to stay away from the right lane. Unfortunately, it was the left shoulder that was not clear. She corrected to the left, and killed several people while paralyzing others.
As demonstrated in the short clip, the driver had her right signal on, and began to get over into the right lane. When the crash avoidance system kicked in, she reacted in the wrong direction, because she was distracted.
She was on a zoom call with a client, and couldn’t see the people directly on her left. When her vehicle alerted her, she assumed that because her right turn signal was on, the alert came from the right lane. This false assumption cost lives.
One of the benefits of using an animation is the potential to see the incident from multiple viewpoints. This clip shows the viewer precisely what the driver saw, and what was distracting her from the road.
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.
