Personal Injury Case Builder Form

When you begin our personal injury intake process, you should be ready to tell us about your incident. Whether it was a car accident, slip and fall or dog bite, we want to hear the all the details and specifics. Be descriptive but keep the information relevant. This will help us to better assess your claim.

Pain journals have five separate purposes:

• First, to record any information related to your actual injuries. This information can help your doctor during your recovery.
• Second, to record any information related to a potential future personal injury case. If, due to the factors of your case, you need to hire an attorney to negotiate for damages, having such a record can greatly help your lawyer with your personal injury claim.
• Third, you’ll generally want to use your journal to preserve any evidence related to injuries you received as a result of the collision.
• Fourth,any information you collect in this journal will be an essential part of your personal injury lawsuit (should such a suit become necessary).
• Fifth, it will also demonstrate the extent of your injuries and damages, while also providing information on how long these injuries affected your life.

Example Pain Journal:

You have three basic choices for starting your own pain journal:

• Write everything down on pen and paper.
• Download an app that does the work for you.
• Record the data and information yourself in a program like Microsoft Excel (my personal preference).

Each of these choices has various pros and cons, but the most important point is that you should choose the format you’re most comfortable with. After all, a pain journal is effectively worthless if you forget to fill it in on a regular basis.

What to Include in Your Pain Journal?

As we noted above, the information you include in your pain journal will often depend on the facts in your case.

However, at a bare minimum, your pain journal should include a variety of different ways for you to keep track of your pain and activity levels. In this way, you may find it helpful to think of your pain journal as a way to keep track of any information you might forget in the future, rather than as a simple diary of your life after the crash.

For example, consider the following two statements:

• “I experienced a great deal of pain in my knee in the days following the collision. This pain inhibited my daily life.”
• “In the first three days after the collision, the pain in my knee kept me from going to work. I had to take [Example Prescription] twice a day to manage my pain, and I couldn’t even make my way to the kitchen to make breakfast on any of these three days.”

While the first statement is fine, it lacks the detail that would render it compelling in a personal injury case. On the other hand, the second statement provides a higher level of detail that often comes with written records, giving it a greater level of credibility.

A Few Common Elements of Pain Journals

• Date – For obvious reasons, it’s important to record the date and time of each entry.
• Specific Location of the Pain, and Any Related Activities – You should also make note of where you feel the pain. This is often paired with a description of of the activity you were performing when you experienced the pain. For example, “I experienced a sharp pain in my left shoulder after sitting for too long.” Information such as this can help support patterns of pain and suffering in your case.
• Pain Scale Rating – Most journals include a “scale rating” for the pain that you’re experiencing. This is usually on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being no pain at all and 10 being the worst pain you’ve ever experienced.
• Medication Information – More commonly used in medical pain journals, it may also be helpful to keep track of any medication you take as a result of the pain. Information on when you last took medication could also be helpful.
• Effects on Your Daily Life – Finally, you should also keep track of any effects that the injury has on your daily life. Even if these inconveniences seem small to you, these changes in your daily routine can add up to significant levels over time. “My husband had to take a day off work to drive me to the doctor,” “I could not lift my child because of pain in arm,” and “I had trouble sleeping because of the pain” are all examples which bring a personal touch to your personal injury case.

What NOT to Include in Your Pain Journal

To list two common examples:

• Be Careful When Making Notes on Exercise Restrictions — For example, if you write, “I tried to go running today but experienced pain in my knee after jogging for a few minutes,” the insurance adjuster will only see the phrase “I tried to go running today.” The defense could pick out this fact and argue that you felt well enough to go running despite the pain, so the pain must not have been that bad.
• Avoid Overwhelming Details: Be Concise — espite the name, your pain journal is not your actual journal. For this reason, you should only include information relating to your injury. Adding excess information will only overwhelm the real point of your pain journal, and may even make some of the other details less valuable during your negotiations.

The Importance of Consistency

Remember, consistency is one of the most important elements of a useful pain journal. If you miss a week, or if you change the style of your entries each time, the insurance company may raise questions about the credibility of your journal.

In general, you should have daily entries for the first month or two following the collision. After that, you can usually get away with weekly status updates which summarize how your injuries affected your life during that week.