Insurance companies will go to great lengths to defend a serious personal injury claim. Often, these companies hire investigators to review your public social media accounts to find any photos or videos they can use against you. Usually, they look for pictures of vacations or times you may go out with friends and take them out of context in the hopes they can trick a jury.

Pictures are worth a thousand words, and in our experience, people with serious injuries don’t like to talk about them. They do their best to try to live their lives as much as possible. They adapt. It doesn’t mean they are not experiencing significant amounts of pain; it means they are doing their best in spite of what they are dealing with.

A photo of a person in the woods may lead one to believe that someone went on a grandiose, very difficult hike up a mountain. In reality, maybe that was the first walk in the woods the injured person took in three years and they found the flattest, least difficult path they could find and desperately wanted to smell the forest as they had done so often before the injury. A picture won’t tell you that back story. Or the gym selfie may lead one to believe that someone is throwing weight around the gym like it’s a muscle beach. In reality, that person used to lift 225lbs routinely and now can barely lift 100lbs, and afterward has to go home, lie down, and take medication to deal with the pain. A picture won’t tell you that back story. And that’s what the insurance company is banking on. They seize on some people’s unknown biases that people who file lawsuits are exaggerating and undeserving. In our experience, that sentiment could not be further from the truth.

In order to minimize the insurance company’s ability to take things out of context, do yourself a favor and set your social media accounts to private. We advise every client to set their social media profiles to private to avoid inappropriate intrusion. While setting your social media profiles to private is okay, deleting photos and videos can be a problem because there are obligations to preserve evidence in legal cases. So do not delete photos and videos, but do yourself a favor and keep prying eyes out of your social media, and don’t let insurance companies take your life out of context.