My Coverage of Expert Depositions in Deposition Checklists and Strategies

I've always thought that it's depositions of experts that are the most interesting and fun to do. In keeping with my interest in expert depositions, I made sure to cover them at length in my book Deposition Checklists and Strategies.

Please excuse this brief commercial, but I wanted to digress from this weblog's usual fare to point out some of the book's contents. The coverage of expert depositions includes a detailed book section about the basics of expert depositions, including eight sections on "the Goals of Expert Depositions," ten sections on "How to Prepare for Expert Depositions," and seven sections on "Expert Depositions Strategies." Some of these separate sections include some of the "practice tips" I've listed below.

In addition, the book includes questions and answers from three full expert depositions:

• Sample Deposition: Defendant’s Causation Expert in a Defective Drug Case.
• Sample Deposition: Defendant’s Roofing Expert in a Property Damage Case.
• Sample Deposition: The Defendant’s Accident Reconstruction Expert.

These sample depositions serve as a template for deposing any kind of expert.

Finally, spread throughout the book, you'll find separate sections containing "practice tips" for expert depositions. Here are some of them:

• Practice Tip: Attempting to Strike the Expert
• Practice Tip: Five Ways to Hit Home Runs With an Expert’s CV
• Practice Tip: Privilege and Experts
• Practice Tip: “Why Is That?” and Other Follow-Up Questions That Never Fail
• Practice Tip: What to Do When You Arrive for an Expert’s Deposition
• Practice Tip: What to Do When the Defendant Buries You With Experts
• Practice Tip: Establish the Role the Defendant’s Lawyer Played in Assisting the Defendant’s Expert
• Practice Tip: How to Move Quickly Through the Expert’s File
• Practice Tip: Catch the Expert Unprepared (by Finding Out What He Hasn’t Read)
• Practice Tip: Asserting Control Over the Witness Early in the Deposition
• Practice Tip: When and How Was the Expert Retained
• Practice Tip: What the Expert Did Not Do
• Practice Tip: E-Mails
• Practice Tip: Pinning Down the Expert
• Practice Tip: You Don’t Need to Be Smarter than the Expert
• Practice Tip: Using the Deposition to Cross-Examine at Trial

There's all this and much more about experts in the book. That concludes this brief commercial. If you want to learn more, look here: Deposition Checklists and Strategies (James Publishing 2006).