At the present time, members of the public take care to preserve the privacy of their information. They hold their hands over the keypad, when entering a password for a credit or debit card. They pay for online protection of their identity. Still, the litigant in a personal injury case often struggles to preserve the privacy of certain information. Insurance companies keep searching for some piece of evidence that can be used to refute the claimant’s/litigant’s comments.
Information that might be requested from a litigant by an insurance company
• W-2s
• Information on employment
• Pay stubs
• Insurance policies
• Size of earnings
• Information on benefits offered by employer
• Medical records
How retention of a lawyer can help limit privacy concerns?
An injury lawyer in Turlock can limit the amount of information that gets requested. An attorney can insist that any material requested should pertain directly to the client’s case. Faced with such insistence, the insurance company feels less inclined to go after a large amount of material.
The lawyer can store the client’s information in a standardized filing system. This should make any particular document easier to find, whenever it is needed. In addition, such a system can be expanded, as the lawyer acquires more clients, and more stored documents. If a litigant does not have a lawyer, then he or she must pay for copies of each requested document. Litigants with an attorney understand that the attorney will pay to have needed documents copied.
If any litigants need to use a copying service, any one of those litigants might need to develop an at-home system for storing the copies. Alternately, the copies could be filed at the place where the documents were copied. That second approach increases the chances that a stored item might get into someone else’s hands. Moreover, most businesses that make a store copies do not hold those copies for more than 6 months. Once in a lawyer’s file, however, a copy could be stored for more than 6 months.
Consider what might happen at the end of a document’s 6 months in the files of a copying business.
It might get tossed out. It might not get shredded first. Consequently, your private information could be found by anyone that wanted to do some dump-diving. In other words, it would not necessarily remain private. A consideration of that possibility makes all the more obvious how retention of a lawyer can help to limit the extent of a litigant’s privacy concerns. A lawyer can hold a document for longer. Then, if the time comes for disposal of that important paper, the staff workers in the lawyer’s office stand ready to shred that particular document, before tossing the shredded paper in the trash.