Deposition Trials and Tribulations
As a young attorney, preparing for a deposition can be daunting. You’re not only charged with learning the facts of the case, but you must also learn the rules of a deposition and how to sharpen your style. Moreover, you are to discover knew information about the case or things you did not know prior to the deposition — after all this is the purpose of a deposition. With that said, I am all for any tips that I can learn to improve my deposition skills. In civil practice, learning to take a good deposition is invaluable. I take three or more depositions a week and learn a valuable lesson each time.
For instance, early on I remember hearing experienced attorneys say, “strike that” mid question. I never did it, but I thought it might be an opportunity to create a cleaner transcript. Could it be that I could use this trick to have the reporter erase what was said to create a more easily read and understood question in the transcript. It was a practice that I immediately put into action, until I reviewed the transcript of my next deposition and realized that “strike that” did absolutely nothing. It simply added a few additional words into the transcript. This is just one of many lessons that I’ve learned in my short history of conducting depositions.
This attorney shares a number of her “teachable moments” during her young adolescent attorney years. A time period quite familiar.
Thousands of young attorneys will sit down to take their first deposition every year the same way I did, with roughly the same amount of dread and exactly the same amount of training.
A lot and none whatsoever.
So that someone might benefit from my own painful experience more than twenty-five years ago, I give you my earliest deposition mistakes.
See, On the Job Deposition Training and for a lighter note see CNN’s article highlighting Justin Beiber’s 2014 deposition, Beiber Don’t Argue With the Lawyers.
