Preserving Documents and Records

An injury claim is, in the end, a claim for money, and money has to be counted. Every dollar you ask an insurance company or a jury to pay you must be tied to a piece of paper that shows what you lost and why. The hospital bill. The pay stub from the weeks you missed. The receipt for the rental car. The mileage to physical therapy.

Lawyers call these "economic damages," meaning losses that come with a dollar figure attached. Ohio law lets you recover them in full, without the caps that apply to pain and suffering, but only if you can prove them. Unproven losses are not paid. An adjuster will not take your word for it, and a jury will not be allowed to guess.

This chapter of The Ohio Personal Injury Guide is a checklist of what to keep and a simple system for keeping it. The companion chapter, Gathering Evidence While It Still Exists, covers evidence about how the injury happened. This one is about proving what it cost you.

The checklist

The police or incident report

Get the full OH-1 crash report, including any supplemental pages, diagrams, and photographs. For a fall or a dog bite, get the store's incident report if they will give it to you, the animal control report, or whatever record was made. Keep the report number and the officer's name.

Medical records and itemized bills

Request records and bills from every provider: the ambulance service, the emergency room, the hospital, the radiology group, every doctor, the physical therapist, the pharmacy. Two points matter here.

First, ask for itemized bills. A summary statement that says "Hospital services: $18,400" is not enough. An itemized bill lists every charge with a code, usually a CPT code for procedures and a diagnosis code for the condition treated. Those codes are how a lawyer, an adjuster, and a jury connect each charge to the injury.

Second, ask for the complete record, not the visit summary you are handed at the front desk. The complete chart includes the history you gave, the exam findings, the imaging reports, and the provider's assessment, which is the evidence discussed in Focus on Treatment First.

Explanations of benefits (EOBs)

Every time your health insurer processes a claim, it sends you an explanation of benefits showing what was billed, what the insurer paid, what was written off, and what you owe. Keep every one. EOBs prove what was actually paid, and they are the starting point for dealing with your health insurer's claim to be repaid from your settlement, which is covered in Medical Bills, Health Insurance, and Liens.

Pharmacy receipts and out-of-pocket costs

Prescriptions, over-the-counter medications, braces, crutches, ice packs, a shower chair, a wedge pillow: keep the receipts. These add up, and they are recoverable. Note on each receipt what it was for.

Mileage to appointments

Your travel to and from medical care is a recoverable expense. Keep a simple log: date, where you went, round-trip miles. Parking and tolls too. A notebook in the car or a note on your phone is fine.

Lost wages: pay stubs and an employer letter

To prove lost income you need pay stubs from before and after the injury, and a letter from your employer on company letterhead stating your job title, your rate of pay, your normal hours, the dates you missed, and whether you used sick leave or vacation (using it is still a loss; you earned that time). If you returned on light duty at lower pay, the letter should say so. If you lost a promotion, overtime, or a bonus because of the injury, document that as well.

Tax returns for the self-employed

If you work for yourself, lost income is proven through tax returns (usually the last three years), profit-and-loss statements, invoices, bank statements, and calendar entries showing cancelled jobs. Start assembling this early; it is the hardest category to reconstruct later.

Photos with timestamps

Your scene and injury photographs should stay in their original digital form, which carries the date and time in the file data. Do not edit them, do not crop them, and do not let a texting app compress them. Back them up to a computer or cloud account. Photos of your recovery over time, your scars, your surgical incisions, and the equipment you had to use are part of the same file.

Repair estimates, total-loss paperwork, and rental receipts

For a vehicle, keep the body shop estimate, the insurer's appraisal, the total-loss valuation, the title paperwork, the rental car agreement, and the receipts for anything you had to buy because the car was gone. Keep photos of the damage before repair. Vehicle damage photographs are also evidence of the force of the collision, which matters when an adjuster claims a "minor impact" could not have hurt you.

Your auto policy declarations page, and your household's

The declarations page is the one- or two-page summary at the front of your auto policy that lists your coverages and limits. Find yours. Then find the declarations pages for every vehicle insured by anyone who lives in your household: a spouse, a parent, an adult child. Your medical payments coverage and your uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage, discussed in Using Your Own Insurance and on our UM/UIM page, may come from a relative's policy, not just your own. Many injured people never learn this because nobody asked for the paperwork.

Health insurance card and plan documents

Keep a copy of your health insurance card, front and back, and if you can get it, the plan's summary of benefits. Whether your plan is through an employer, the marketplace, Medicare, or Medicaid affects how much of your settlement it can claim back. Your lawyer will need to know which it is.

All correspondence with insurers

Every letter, email, and text from any insurance company, yours or theirs, goes in the file. Keep the envelopes; postmarks matter. Keep a log of phone calls: date, time, the adjuster's name, and a few words about what was said. If an adjuster makes a promise or an offer on the phone, write it down immediately and ask them to put it in writing.

Your pain and recovery journal

A short daily or weekly note about how you feel and what you could not do is the best evidence of the human side of the injury. It is also how you will remember, a year from now, that you missed your daughter's recital or could not mow the lawn for four months. Keep it honest and keep it factual. Do not write it for an audience; write it for yourself. Your lawyer will decide later whether and how to use it.

A simple folder system

You do not need software. You need one place and a few labels.

Get an accordion file or a set of folders and label them:

1. Report and scene (police report, incident report, photos on a USB drive)
2. Medical records
3. Medical bills and EOBs
4. Receipts and mileage (pharmacy, equipment, parking, mileage log)
5. Work and income (pay stubs, employer letter, tax returns)
6. Vehicle (estimates, total-loss paperwork, rental)
7. Insurance (declarations pages, health card, all letters from any insurer, call log)
8. Journal

Keep a digital copy of everything too. Photograph or scan each document as it comes in and put it in a folder on your phone or computer with the same eight labels. Email a copy to yourself or to a cloud drive so a lost phone does not mean a lost file.

When you meet with a lawyer, bring the whole thing. A client who walks in with an organized file saves weeks of record-gathering and gets a faster, more accurate evaluation of the case.

Why economic damages must be documented

Ohio law divides injury damages into economic losses, which are measurable in dollars, and non-economic losses, which are pain, suffering, and loss of enjoyment of life. Economic losses include medical expenses (past and future), lost wages, lost earning capacity, and other out-of-pocket costs. They are not capped, but each one has to be proven with evidence that a judge will admit: a bill, a record, a pay stub, a receipt, or the testimony of someone who can authenticate them.

This cuts both ways. Thorough documentation can double the economic damages in a case, because losses that would otherwise be forgotten get counted. Missing documentation can erase them. And because adjusters and juries often use the size of the economic losses as a rough measure when valuing pain and suffering, the paper trail affects the whole case, not just the part it directly proves. What Your Case Is Worth explains how these categories fit together.

Key takeaways

• Economic damages are recoverable in full in Ohio, but only if they are proven with documents.
• Get itemized medical bills with codes and the complete chart from every provider; keep every EOB.
• Track mileage, receipts, and out-of-pocket costs as you go.
• Prove lost wages with pay stubs and an employer letter; the self-employed need tax returns and business records.
• Find the auto declarations pages for every vehicle in your household, not just your own.
• Keep every insurer letter and a log of every call.
• Use one folder system with eight labels, and keep a digital copy.