It will be critically important for anyone or any company, intending to make a claim against BP / British Petroleum for losses caused by the BP oil spill, to collect, organize and preserve evidence to support their claim against BP.
In order to determine what evidence you will need to keep it will be critical that you receive timely legal advice from a lawyer familiar with the law and rules of evidence that will apply to your claim. There may be variations of the legal requirements based upon the jurisdiction or venue “what the lawsuit” is filed. There may be variations in the evidentiary requirements based upon the statute or law under which the lawsuit claim is filed with the courts.
First and foremost, it is important to collect evidence that accurately reflects the degree of harm or losses that you sustained directly from the BP oil spill.
By “accurately” I mean that it is and will always be important that the damages you claim are, in fact, damages that are, in your “good faith belief”, casually related to the oil spill.
There is one lesson I have learned from practicing law for almost 30 years and that is that nothing on the scale of justice is quite so harmful to a claimant or litigant as evidence of dishonesty. You can have the most egregious injury or harm, but if you attempt to “guild the lilly” by making false or inflated claims you can quickly see the real value of your claim start to go down the sewer.
Yes, there will be moral outrage about the BP oil spill and, yes, it’s likely that jurors will respond to evidence that the Gulf oil spill was caused by something more than happenstance or simple human error. However, you can also be certain that judges, jurors and the public will be equally outraged by those who will attempt to wrongfully profit from this catastrophe and that BP – as any defendant – can be counted on to closely scrutinize claims and cry “foul” when someone submits false claims.
If you are planning to submit a claim against BP or if it’s possible, as the oil plumes drift, that you may in the future be forced to submit a claim for damages against BP, then it is critical that you begin collecting all evidence that will honestly and accurately support that claim.
Keep the ultimate deciders of all claims against BP / British Petroleum – the jurors and juries in any BP oil spill lawsuit – on your side by establishing, by a complete and accurate record of the facts and evidence of your economic losses caused by the oil spill, that you are a victim of BP’s neglect and not a perpetrator of wrong yourself.