My final tip is very “in the weeds” of outline mechanics. It’s also short. But don’t let that fool you – this tip will improve your deposition preparation and performance immensely.
When preparing for and taking a deposition you want to be efficient. What gets in the way of efficiency? One big thing is needing to juggle multiple items. If you can’t work on your outline unless you have your binders at hand, you’re going to be less efficient. Try pulling out your binders when you’re sitting in the middle seat on United. Similarly, in the deposition itself, if you’re flipping back and forth between your outline and the exhibit you are showing the witness, you’re going to be less efficient. You’ll lose your place, you’ll pause, and worst of all, you’ll lose eye contact with the witness and your conversational rhythm.
The more you can keep your deposition prep materials in one place, the more efficient and effective you will be.
Pause for a bit of a shameless plug here. I think this concept of having quick access in one place is really important. Not just for depositions but for a lot of what we do as attorneys. In fact, I think it’s so important that I actually left my comfortable and lucrative big law partnership to build a software platform designed around just this concept. It’s called Align. Its sole purpose is to give you binders and notes for all your matters in one, quickly accessible, place, wherever you are, via iPad or laptop. So in many ways, the motivation for this deposition tip—keeping everything in one place—really stems from one of my core beliefs on the practical aspects of case preparation.
But you don’t need Align to keep all your depo materials in one place (though it helps!). This tip will get you very far down that road.
As attorneys, we are used to citations: “Courts have held for years that blah blah blah. See Adams v. Smith, etc.” As a result, attorneys tend to write deposition outlines that cite the documents they are using in questioning.
For example:
That’s fine, but it means when you are writing and refining your deposition outline (including all the various question branches that you should be writing out! See Tip 2.), you are constantly flipping back and forth to your binder or PDF to make sure you have the reference right. And when you are in the deposition itself, it’s the same thing. You need the document and your outline both in front of you, and you have to flip back and forth between them (and sometimes within them).
Let me make your life a lot easier. Just paste a screenshot of the relevant portion of the document into your deposition outline. Like this:
With the clip pasted in, you can write and re-write your questions without leaving your outline, opening a PDF, or pulling out your binder. Want to do some last minute review of your questions on the plane or at breakfast at your hotel the morning of the deposition? You only need to reference one document—your outline. In the deposition itself? Stop doing the exhibit-to-outline juggle. Hand the witness their copy of the full document, and then you just keep using your outline, with the relevant clip from the document already in it.
Trust me. Once you start pasting document clips into your outline, you will not go back. It is truly a gamechanger.
A few “sub tips” to make this work well:
As a bonus – go ahead and download this sample outline, which has Word styles already set up to correctly do the image border and citation automatically. Just apply the “Exhibit Clip” style to the images, and the “Clip Cite” style to the citations. (What? You don’t know about styles?!? Stay tuned for a blog post on that.)
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That brings to a close my first practice pointer series. To sum up, improve your deposition outlines by following these three tips:
Feel free to comment or message me on LinkedIn if you have any questions, or if you have thoughts on future topics.