The Trial Practice Tips Blog

I'm revisiting the three podcasts I posted at my other blog, Evan Schaeffer's Legal Underground, on the topic of advanced deposition techniques. Here are the links:

The Legal Underground Podcast Episode #49: Advanced Deposition Techniques, Part 1 -- Five Tips for Asserting Control at Depositions

The Legal Underground Podcast Episode #50: Advanced Deposition Techniques, Part 2--Four Ways to Use Psychology at Your Next Deposition

The Legal Underground Podcast Episode #51: Advanced Deposition Techniques, Part 3 -- Miscellaneous Tips for Expert Depositions

My other podcasts can be found at Legal Underground in the podcasting category.

Lawyers who want a quick guide to depositions should take a look at the "Deposition Cheat Sheet," by Christian Denmon of Denmon Law. 

Denmon's article deals with both basic and advanced topics. Here's a tip for dealing with unresponsive witnesses, which Denmon calls the "body turn" -- 

When the Witness rambles uncontrollable, slowly turn your body away from the witness. Don’t stop the witness from rambling, just turn your body. The effect is amazing.

I think I might try it myself!

See "Proper Deposition Objections," by Susan Minsberg at The Lawyerist, a post that has been "substantially revised" since I first linked to it in 2012.

The conventional wisdom is that you shouldn't question your own witness at your opponent's discovery deposition. At Above the Law, Mark Herrmann explains why this conventional wisdom can be "dangerously wrong": "The Need For Direct Exams Of Your Own Witnesses At Depositions."

From Philly Law Blog: "How to Defend a Deposition – Don’t Just Show Up and Play Lawyer"--

First, and most importantly, your major role is preparing your witness. 99% of defending a deposition properly is the preparation. If you prepare your witness properly, you should be able to just be a potted plant . . . . So how do you do that?

This quote is from the middle of the post, which includes a lot of basic information about defending depositions, including some advice for preparing a client for a deposition.

Related posts from The Trial Practice Tips Blog:

Plaintiffs' Lawyers: How to Prepare for Your Client's Deposition

Defense Lawyers: How to Prepare Witnesses for Depositions

From Eric Turkewitz at the New York Personal Injury Law Blog: "How Not to Ask a Question"--

Digging through an old file on a settled case, I came across some notes that I made during a deposition I was defending. It was a simple hit in the rear auto case and I jotted down some of the questions the defense lawyer asked.

Each question, it seemed, was more wretched than the next. None were spoken in plain English.

Read the full post for some (humorous, at least to me) examples. As Turkewitz observes, "It isn’t really hard to abuse the English language. All you need to do is go to law school."

What do you do when your witness gives an inaccurate answer at a deposition?

Jump in and offer a correction? Do nothing? Something in between?

Get the answer at Litigation and Trial.

Compare these two recent posts--

On April 11, Jim Dedman, in a post at NC Law Blog, described how iPads might be used to do away with paper exhibits at depositions. He concluded, "Someday, though, someday, we’ll be able to arrive at the deposition with just our laptop or tablet . . . But, alas, that day has not yet arrived."

Just two days later, Jeff Richardson at iPhone J.D. brought news of this very development:

I took a deposition yesterday in which the witness had produced thousands of pages of documents. In the past, that would have meant lugging tons lots of boxes and binders to the deposition. Instead, I just put everything on my iPad. I used Apple's Numbers app to read some Excel files. The PDF files went in to my Dropbox account, and while it took over an hour to sync almost 2 GB of data to GoodReader, everything worked great once it was there. Searching for a term in a 2900 page PDF file was slower in GoodReader than it would have been with a laptop computer, but it was fast enough for what I needed during the deposition. It worked great, and reminded me (once again) of why the iPad is such a great litigation tool.

Read both posts in full for more good ideas about the use of iPads at depositions.