Speaker 1 (00:09):
Welcome to The Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda and I'll be your host.
(00:22):
Today I wanna talk to you about deposition preparation essentials. I wanna give you some quick tips and some things to think about when you're preparing your client for their next deposition. The first thing you need to know is that preparing your client for the deposition is one of the two or three most important parts of a case before trial. How your client does in the deposition is going to make or break how the defense evaluates your case. So I cannot overemphasize enough, you cannot put too much time in preparing your client for a deposition. Um, and that includes your thought and process into what you're gonna do to prepare your client for that. So the first step that I think you need to do is, number one, you need to understand what the defendant's case is and what are their best arguments. This means sitting down by yourself and thinking whiteboarding.
(01:13):
What is the defense gonna go at? Is this a liability fight? Is this a damages fight? Is it a client credibility fight? And your client is always being evaluated? So step one is your own homework. What's the defense's cases? Step two, you need to make sure the client understands what the setting's gonna be like. That means you need to schedule not one, but at least two deposition preparation sessions. Okay? That does not include you explaining what the process is. So our steps are typically one, we will send the client a letter, explain the deposition process. We will have a short meeting where we explain what a deposition is and when it's gonna occur. Then we will have an in person or zoom meeting. We're actually gonna sit, explain it in person, go into more detail and talk through questions and do some mock questioning. And then we're gonna have a follow up deposition preparation session.
(02:06):
And we may even do more than that depending on the client. So that's number two. You need to make sure the client understands what it's gonna be like. Number three is when you're doing those things, you wanna make sure you do not overload the client with too much information and you don't wanna make it a memorization contest. That's critical. Number four, you gotta make sure that they know to tell the truth. We tell the clients that we can fix anything other than a lie. And a lie could be a lie of omission or co commission. Um, so you wanna make sure your clients know I've gotta tell the truth no matter what, and I've yet to have a case personally that I wasn't able to fix as long as the client was honest, uh, and was truthful. Next, when you conduct your mock deposition, you want to set it up in a way to how the client is gonna physically be set up, have them dress the way they're gonna dress, have them sit where they're gonna sit, have the someone pretend to be a court reporter, have someone pretend to be a videographer.
(03:05):
You need them to go into the setting they're going to be in. And then I would advise you to have someone in your staff or another lawyer to do a mock deposition with you being on your client's team. I think that's important cuz they may have grown comfortable with you and you need them to be comfortable with hearing the questions from a stranger. Next, this is important. Keep the energy positive. I don't care how bad your client is doing their deposition. Do not under any circumstances, turn it into negative energy. They're already stressed, they're probably doing bad because they are stressed out and they can't remember what day of the week it is. You getting upset with them does not help at all. It makes things 10 times worse.
(03:48):
And the final piece of it is, is you know, make sure your client feels at ease and that you're there to support them. And like I said, you can't put too much time into this part of the case. And I think if you put the time and energy into preparing your client for the deposition the right way, you'll get the best results. And I could go on this topic for days or hours. There's books or seminars, there's whole CLEs on the topic, but I wanted to give you some my quick tips and quick hits so you knew kind of some guidepost to how to prepare a client for a deposition.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Effective Lawyer. You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast@zinlaw.com. As always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod. Thanks.