Aviation runs on documentation most industries would call excessive. A preflight checklist for a machine the pilot flew yesterday. A squawk sheet for a noise that is probably nothing. A logbook entry for every hour in the air. The reasoning behind all of it is that memory makes a poor witness and paper makes a better one, and that the cost of writing something down is always lower than the cost of reconstructing it later.
The habit worth taking from aviation is the writing down, and it applies in a parking lot at closing time just as well as it does on a ramp, on the night someone else's bad decision ends with a bumper in your door.
What people remember three weeks after a collision is thin. A color, a direction, a strong feeling about who had the light. What holds up is duller. Photographs of both cars where they came to rest, before anyone moves them for traffic. The plate. The other driver's insurance card, photographed rather than copied down. The responding officer's name and the report number. The name of the person who pulled over to help, which is the one detail nobody thinks to collect and the one that is impossible to recover afterward.
The legal end of that is somebody else's trade. Tingey Injury Law Firm, which works injury cases out of an office on South Main, publishes an accident benefits guide and a free case review form, and lists car accidents, drunk driver accidents, pedestrian accidents and motorcycle accidents among the case types it handles. We have no connection to the firm and no stake in whether anybody calls it.
A pen and a notepad work fine for a plate number, which is roughly the level of preparation being suggested here. Nobody needs a checklist laminated to the visor, and nobody is going to run one under stress anyway. What actually happens is that a person stands in a lot with a phone in their hand, and the difference between a useful ten minutes and a wasted one comes down to whether they thought about it in advance even once.
Anyone who has stood in a parking lot late at night waiting on a tow knows how quickly the details start going soft, and how little of the night is left by the time the paperwork begins.