One injury file, assembled in the order the documents can still be obtained

The two documents everyone assumes decide an injury claim are made by other people: the clinical note by a clinician, the collision report by an officer. The rest of the file is made by the person who was hurt, or it is not made at all — and the parts easiest to obtain are the parts that stop being obtainable first. What follows walks one ordinary file being put together, in the order the documents become available, with the rule that governs each one stated where the file reaches it.

What is walked below is a genre, not a person: the sequence the instruments themselves describe — three American no-fault statutes that define what a lost day is, a Spanish statute on how lost income is proved and which everyday expenses are recoverable, an English pre-action protocol enumerating what travels with a claim, and two American rules of hearsay. No name, no date, no employer, no injury and no amount of our own appears in it; every figure quoted is a legislature’s, from the section that sets it. Nothing here says what care anyone should seek. The medical record itself belongs to the companion piece in this track and is not repeated.

Week one: the appointment that generates two documents and leaves one behind

The first visit produces a clinical record. It also produces a second claimable fact almost nobody writes down: the time the visit cost. Minnesota’s statute is explicit about it. For the income loss benefit, a person “unable by reason of the injury to work continuously” includes “a person who misses time from work, including reasonable travel time, and loses income, vacation, or sick leave benefits, to obtain medical treatment for an injury arising out of the maintenance or use of a motor vehicle.” That reverses an assumption people make constantly: paid leave spent on an appointment is not evidence that nothing was lost — the entitlement consumed is the thing lost. Spain does the equivalent on the expense side, assimilating journeys made on the occasion of health care for temporary injuries to the care expense itself.

So one appointment is three entries, and two exist only if somebody records them on the day. The general rule, where the example first meets it: a document created as a by-product of somebody else’s routine will exist whether or not the reader thinks about it, and everything else will not.

Whether your own market runs a no-fault first-party benefit of this kind at all, or leaves all of it to a claim against the other driver, is in the jurisdiction notes below.

The first document only the injured person can make

The contemporaneous account is on every list of this kind, and it is the item with a rule of evidence behind it that the lists never cite. Rule 803(5) admits a recorded recollection: a record “on a matter the witness once knew about but now cannot recall well enough to testify fully and accurately”, “made or adopted by the witness when the matter was fresh in the witness’s memory”, and “accurately reflects the witness’s knowledge”. Two of those three conditions are about timing and cannot be repaired afterwards. The same rule states the limit in the next line, better known at the start than at the end: “If admitted, the record may be read into evidence but may be received as an exhibit only if offered by an adverse party.” A diary is not a document that speaks for itself; it is one that lets a person say accurately, later, what they would otherwise be guessing at.

Rule 803(3) draws a second line through the same notebook, admitting a statement of a then-existing “physical condition (such as mental feeling, pain, or bodily health)” but excluding “a statement of memory or belief to prove the fact remembered or believed” — the day’s entry on one side of it, the weekend’s reconstruction on the other. Neither rule says how long or how often to write, and neither do we.

The wage-loss letter, and what three legislatures say a lost day is

Kansas does the arithmetic first. “Monthly earnings” means, for a regularly employed or regularly self-employed person, one twelfth of the annual earnings at the time of injury — computed off the year before the crash. Disability benefits pay the loss of those earnings at 100% of it, “unless such allowances are deemed not includable in gross income for federal income tax purposes, in which event such allowances shall be limited to 85%”, to a maximum of not less than $900 per month for not more than one year.

Minnesota and North Dakota both start at eighty-five percent and both subtract the same thing. Minnesota: compensation “shall be reduced by any income from substitute work actually performed by the injured person or by income the injured person would have earned in available appropriate substitute work which the injured person was capable of performing but unreasonably failed to undertake.” North Dakota defines “work loss” itself that way, in the same terms.

That deduction puts the reader’s own conduct into the file. Whether alternative work was offered, what it was, and why it was or was not taken are facts with a statutory consequence, and they leave no trace unless somebody writes down the conversation in which they happened.

When nobody issues you a payslip

Minnesota’s income loss “includes the costs incurred by a self-employed person to hire substitute employees to perform tasks which are necessary to maintain the income of the injured person, which are normally performed by the injured person, and which cannot be performed because of the injury.” That is a cost paid out, evidenced by having paid it — a different object from a shortfall inferred from a quiet month. Where income is variable, Spain writes the method of proof into the statute: variable net income is established “mediante la referencia a los percibidos en períodos análogos del año anterior al accidente o a la media de los obtenidos en los tres años inmediatamente anteriores al mismo, si ésta fuera superior”. Kansas, for a person not regularly employed, directs the insurer to “average the annual compensation of such person for not to exceed five years preceding the year of injury or death”.

The general rule, where the example meets it: every one of these tests is retrospective and comparative. Each needs a documented before, and the before is made of records that exist today and will be harder to obtain in a year.

The half of the loss that is not money at all

All four statutes pay for the things the injured person can no longer do at home, and three of them define the benefit by an expense that was incurred. Minnesota reimburses expenses reasonably incurred in obtaining “usual and necessary substitute services” the person “would have performed not for income but for direct personal benefit or for the benefit of the injured person’s household”, to a maximum of $200 per week, excluding “all replacement services loss sustained on the date of injury and the first seven days thereafter”. North Dakota caps the same head at fifteen dollars per day and restricts who may supply the service: “others not members of the injured person’s household”. Kansas allows $25 per day, “for not longer than 365 days after the date such expenses are incurred”.

Spain takes the other route for one case: exclusive dedication to household tasks is itself valued where the person can no longer perform them, and the same paragraph makes that indemnity “incompatible con el resarcimiento de los gastos generados por la sustitución de tales tareas”. One or the other, not both.

The consequence is rarely stated: a relative who steps in for nothing is invisible to a head of loss that exists precisely to pay for that help.

The receipts nobody keeps

Spain’s article 142 is the clearest statement in anything read here of what this category is. Expenses the injury causes “en el desarrollo de la vida ordinaria del lesionado” are recoverable until the end of the healing process, “siempre que se justifiquen y sean razonables en atención a sus circunstancias personales y familiares” — and the article names, in particular, increased costs of the injured person’s mobility and relatives’ journeys made to attend to them.

Two conditions, both documentary: justified, and reasonable in light of circumstances. A head of loss a statute conditions on justification is one a shoebox of till receipts evidences and no reconstruction reaches. Article 143 adds the symmetrical point — public benefits received for the same head are deducted — so the letter from a state agency belongs in the file for the reason the letter from an employer does.

Where the file goes, and what it is called there

In England and Wales it is an enumerated item rather than a suggestion. Where an interim payment is requested, “the claimant must also send evidence of pecuniary losses and disbursements”; and the Stage 2 Settlement Pack “must comprise” a numbered list whose third element is, exactly, “evidence of pecuniary losses”. Not an annex to the medical report — a component of the pack, without which the pack is incomplete on the protocol’s terms.

How long the insurer then has to answer, and from what act that deadline runs, is in the jurisdiction notes below.

The section’s claim readiness checklist, on its injury mode, lists the documents these instruments name and nothing else. It assembles a file; it does not assess an injury, and it cannot.

What we cannot tell you

We cannot tell you what any of this comes to. Valuation belongs to the next piece in this track, which declines to produce a number as firmly as this one does; nothing read here would support one in any case, since the statutes quoted cap substantially the same benefit at figures an order of magnitude apart.

We cannot tell you whether an absent diary has ever been held against anyone: no court’s published opinion was opened for this article. Everything above comes from statutes, a protocol and two rules of evidence, which say what a file must contain and how a loss is proved — not what an adjudicator makes of a gap in one.

And we cannot tell you how long to keep writing; no instrument read here sets an interval for any of it. What they do say, in four drafting traditions, is one structural thing: each of these heads of loss is defined by a document, each document has a moment at which it is cheap to obtain, and none of those moments is later than today.