Every driver on the road today carries a witness in their pocket. Without needing to alter your settings, your phone automatically logs when a screen was unlocked, which app was open, and when a message was typed and sent — often down to the second, recorded in real time. Cars and trucks record their own speed, braking, and steering in the seconds before impact.
Any experienced Oregon personal injury lawyer will tell you that insurance companies and corporate defendants move quickly to collect the digital evidence that helps them, often while the injured person is still in the hospital. The side that secures the data first usually controls the story. It can provide critical evidence to show what really happened in a crash—and it can also be overwritten, lost or removed on purpose.
In this blog, the team at Barton Trial Attorneys explains what digital evidence exists, how it’s used, and what you should do to protect it.
Speak with an Oregon Personal Injury Lawyer: (541) 265-5377
What Can We Learn From Digital Evidence?
Digital evidence often provides a neutral perspective on a high-stakes situation. In many ways, digital evidence is an ideal “witness;” the memory never fades, there’s no back and forth between eyewitnesses, and the data is unaffected by the stress of the moment.
A properly preserved phone extraction or vehicle download can show:
- Whether a driver was texting, scrolling, or watching video at the moment of impact
- How fast a vehicle was going, and whether the driver braked at all
- Where a vehicle was and how long a driver had been on the road
- What a commercial driver was told by dispatch, and when
Distraction remains one of the deadliest problems on American roads. According to the National Safety Council’s analysis of federal crash data, 3,208 people were killed in distraction-affected crashes in 2024. Those numbers are widely believed to undercount the problem, because distraction is hard to prove without data.
What To Do After a Crash to Protect Digital Evidence
- Keep your own phone and don’t reset or delete anything. Deleting data after a crash can look like hiding evidence, even when it isn’t.
- Note any cameras nearby, including homes, businesses, traffic signals. Tell your lawyer quickly.
- Keep your vehicle as-is. Don’t let it be repaired, sold, or scrapped until its data has been downloaded.
- Don’t give an insurance adjuster access to your phone, your vehicle data, or your accounts without talking to a lawyer first.
- Call a lawyer within days. The sooner preservation letters go out, the more evidence survives.
Types of Digital Evidence Collected After a Crash
The driver’s phone
Oregon prohibits driving while holding or using a mobile electronic device under ORS 811.507. Most phone activities are illegal while the vehicle is in motion. A modern smartphone keeps detailed internal logs. A forensic extraction, performed by a qualified examiner using specialized tools, an recover:
- Screen activity like when the phone was unlocked and when the screen was on;
- App usage, including which app was in the foreground, and for how long;
- Messaging data, like, when texts or chat messages were composed, sent, and read;
- Keyboard and touch activity that dispositively shows that someone was typing;
- Location and motion data to show whether the phone was moving at driving speed during that activity; and
- App data files that record events with precise timestamps; these files can show what a driver was doing even when the app’s visible history has been cleared.
The most powerful phone evidence lines up these timestamps against the moment of impact. When the data shows a message being typed two seconds before a vehicle left its lane, the argument is over.
Our own experience: In one case our firm worked on, forensic analysis of the JSON files on a driver’s phone established exactly what the driver was doing when the crash happened. That analysis proved distracted driving and supported a manslaughter conviction.
Cell phone carrier records
Wireless carriers keep records of calls and texts. This includes the time of the call, the incoming or outgoing number, and the duration. In civil cases, federal law generally prevents carriers from handing over the content of messages in response to a subpoena, but the records showing when messages were sent are often available. Those records show that a phone was used; forensic extraction will then show exactly how.
Important note: Carriers set their own retention periods, and some records are kept for only a limited time. If you believe a phone record may prove useful in a personal injury case, call Barton Trial Attorneys as soon as possible to protect your case: (541) 265-5377
The vehicle’s event data recorder (“black box”)
Most passenger vehicles have an event data recorder that captures a few seconds of data around a crash: speed, throttle, braking, steering, and seatbelt use. In Oregon, that data belongs to the vehicle’s owner, and generally can’t be retrieved without the owner’s written consent or a court order. Oregon law also bars an insurer from conditioning payment of your claim on your consent to download your car’s data.
Once a totaled car goes to a salvage yard and is crushed or resold, its data is gone. Again, this is why we strongly recommend filing a lawsuit as soon as you believe you have a viable claim.
Infotainment and connected-car systems
Many newer cars sync with phones over Bluetooth. Infotainment systems can store call logs, contact lists, text history, and navigation data. Connected-car services may also log location and driving behavior. While these may be of secondary importance relative to personal phone use or black box information, this data may be able to corroborate (or contradict) what a driver says.
Commercial truck data
Federal rules bar commercial drivers from texting or using a hand-held phone while driving, and a carrier’s own data can prove a violation. Commercial vehicles generate additional data from a collision, including:
- Engine control modules that record speed, braking, and hard-stop events;
- Electronic logging devices that track hours of service, which federal rules require carriers to keep for six months;
- Forward- and driver-facing cameras, which may record only when triggered and overwrite quickly;
- Telematics systems that track location, speed, and following distance in real time; and
- Dispatch messages and delivery-scanner data that show the pressure a driver was under.
Our truck accident lawyers leverage these data against the often-contradictory testimony of the defendant truck driver, dispatcher, and the trucking company’s insurance carrier. The data collected from these massive vehicles can often make or break your case, so it is important to act quickly to preserve your case.
Video from the scene
Doorbell cameras, business security systems, traffic cameras, and other drivers’ dash cams can capture a crash from every angle. Many of these systems overwrite footage within days or weeks.
Speak with an Oregon Personal Injury Lawyer: (541) 265-5377
How Digital Evidence Gets Lost (And What To Do About It)
Digital evidence can disappear accidentally or on purpose. Most of the time it just quietly gets overwritten before it can be saved. A preservation letter, sent immediately to every party, protects the relevant data from destruction. It affects evidence in the hands of the other driver, their employer, the trucking company, insurers, and nearby businesses. When the stakes are high, a court order may be needed to secure a phone or vehicle before it’s altered.
Data can be lost when:
- A trucking company’s camera system records over itself on a routine cycle;
- A wrecked car is sold for salvage before anyone downloads its data;
- A phone is replaced, reset, or upgraded;
- A business’s security footage loops old footage (sometimes on a 30-day cycle); and
- A carrier’s routine retention period runs out.
Oregon does not recognize a separate lawsuit for destroying evidence, though courts can impose sanctions or instruct a jury that missing evidence should be presumed unfavorable. Those remedies are a poor substitute for the evidence itself. We advise speaking with an attorney as soon as possible to protect your case.
How do you collect digital evidence after an accident?
An injured person’s lawyer can ask the court to order a forensic examination of the other driver’s phone. Courts typically require a showing that the phone is relevant (for example, a witness saw the driver looking down, or the crash fits a distraction pattern). Examinations are often limited to a narrow window of time around the crash and handled by a neutral examiner to protect unrelated private information
Auto Accident? Call Barton Trial Attorneys
At Barton Trial Attorneys, we know that successful cases start with digital evidence. We work with forensic examiners, accident reconstructionists, and data experts to turn raw records into a clear story a jury can understand. Data proves what happened. Our job is to show why it matters: to you, to your family, and to everyone else on Oregon’s roads.
Barton Trial Attorneys takes only a select number of at a time, and we devote two trial attorneys and a full staff to each one. We encourage you to learn more about our work on car accident, truck accident, traumatic brain injury, and wrongful death cases.