Driving along in your lane, minding your own business when the next moment another driver starts to merge in front of you and impacts your vehicle, you get out, and swap details, to your disbelief, they are actually disputing liability and have the audacity to claim that you merged into them, you refute this, exchange details, and wonder to yourself how this can possibly be happening? don’t worry, not at fault changing lane accidents are often disputed, You’re not alone.
It has long been an interesting societal observation to me, almost anthropologically so, that merging accidents or changing lanes accidents are so often disputed, there are a variety of other common motor vehicle accident types that by all rights should be disputed, that are so far less frequently than merging incident, and its always the same thing “No actually, they merged into me”
Disputes With Identical Version of Events & Similar Damage Points – Dispute Resolution Challenges
Now, as always with not at fault changing lane accidents, sometimes of course what the person is telling you is true, but in the event that you are aware that the other party did in fact merge into your lane, it can become a challenging scenario to try and debate sometimes with the other parties insurer, because quite often the damage points can look similar to the untrained eye and require a specialist expert witness such as an assessor or collision expert to determine which often, a claims handler, is not, which is fair enough.
The later of those individuals, expert witnesses, generally only come into play quite late into the negotiations or legal state if there is a dispute, in the first onset the other parties insurance company will most likely as you to complete a version and diagram, which, on the one hand you would think is not terribly useful because of course it will only be a written articulation of what you have already verbally put forward correct? Yes and no.
Version & Diagrams – What Are They? & Why Are They Requested for Not At Fault Changing Lane Accidents ?
While a verbal statement is just that, a version & diagram is considered the insurance companies way of consolidating your understanding as to what happened in the accident as being your true statement, no, it doesn’t carry the same weight as other legal documents, however, generally speaking when you ask someone to put it in writing, if they are in some way distorting the truth or otherwise being disingenuous you will often find they either object, capitulate, or suddenly don’t wish to proceed.
When you are not at fault, and you are confident of this in a not at fault merging accident always oblige the request of the at fault drivers’ insurance company and complete the Version & Diagram form in a timely manner, and be pleasant about it, it speaks volumes for your character.
The Dollars in The Detail – Make Sure To Explain The Nuances
Now under normal circumstances I would not tell you to be verbose in your articulation of what occurred in your not at fault changing lanes accident to the insurance company or not at fault hire car company, however in the case of merging accidents it can be to your benefit, so long as, you’re not overtly verbose.
Let us say for instance you had finished work for the day and were travelling home, it’s the same route you regularly take, and you are familiar as to what lanes you need to be in to go where, it’s a normal day, so you had no plans or errands to attend to, so you started driving straight home.
How To Articulate Anecdotal Evidence To Support Your Case
Normally, if you were true to the generally accepted school of thought (which I agree with) in that you keep an accident description to the salient points, you would most likely say, I was driving along So & So Rd in the right hand lane and the other person merged into the front left hand side of my vehicle, which is fine, if they are not disputing, if they are disputing, then this is where the additional information about your travel intentions really can come into play.
- Advise the amount of time you have lived at your current residence
- Advise the amount of time you have been in that occupation
- Advise the amount of time you have worked at that residence.
- Advise that you had no other intentions of travel other than proceeding home that day.
- Advise that this is the route regularly travelled.
Now, if you are of a scientific background such as me, your reaction may be the same as mine initially “But that’s just confirmation bias, your present questions answers support the fact and believing it to be true, without any bridging correlation of evidence between those facts”, which, is 100% true, however.
The Lab, The Court, The Burden of Probabilities
The setting of a scientific lab, and that of a courtroom are two very distinctly different things, and in the industry of law, and indeed in its governance so far as legal verdicts are concerned, information like this, does color evidence in a favorable fashion and assists in deductive reasoning to work towards a conclusion, that based on the burden of probabilities a certain version of events does appear to be true, and an outcome reached.
If we are not to hyper focused on the semantics of the world of science vs the world of law (colloquially speaking) it does however make a lot of logical sense when you think about it, if the person that has been involved in the not at fault changing lane accidents was driving on the same road they do every day, had nowhere else to be, and were heading home after work, why would they be changing lanes? For what possible purpose? Then you look at the damage points, and they are a bit of a “impact crater” as we would say in astronomy, and it does seem you can deduce the outcome.
Think Outside The Box – Lateral Thinking Towards Dispute Resolution for Not At Fault Changing Lane Accidents
Now if this insight seems counter intuitive to what one would normally do, and keep to “just the facts mam” then you would be 100% correct, it is, however, the reason these kind of questions and what I refer to as “spatial anecdotal evidence” come into play is because when hard evidence leads to no verdict, in the interest of reaching an outcome of investigation, one must then attempt to use other factors, and in cases like not at fault merging accidents, or changing lanes accidents spatial information, helps calibrate, the factual information.
So to be clear, it is not, in your mind, that the answers to those questions, lead to the factual answer, they do not, they allow you to calibrate in your mind, or in the case of the person articulating it to the at fault drivers insurance company, why, there is no reason for you to have changed lanes, so as to allow them to calculate a liability determination based on the facts at hand they do have, such as damage photos, police reports, assessor quotes and similar information.
And again, as I said, curiously they are one of the most disputed kind of accidents that occur in Australia, I have contemplated as to why this is the case, psychologically and behaviorally so, but have no real answer, other than speculative thoughts, all the same, as it is the case, if your in any not at fault changing lane accidents that are disputed, you’re not alone, just make sure you try and provide as much information as possible to the investigating parties so that if the physical evidence alone is not sufficient the spatial may be able to assist in proving you were not at fault.