Practice Management

Depositions: Quit wasting time and money.

By Dan Hull

Formal discovery is too often this: an unimaginative, cookie-cutter, dumb-ass, straight-up lazy, wasteful, and client-unfriendly way to learn much of the background information--and many of the hard and developed facts that will frame and flesh out your case.

Roll up your sleeves, Jack, even--and maybe especially--in corporate cases. Trials are always about people. Un-weenie yourselves. Why use deposition time to learn things you and yours can learn quickly and inexpensively and lash together from:

Phone calls, live humans, your client, client employees, ex-girlfriends, ex-husbands, ex-bosses, bartenders, town drunks, libraries, American Legion halls, store clerks, hopeless gossips, old dudes in cafes who drool on their shirts, neighborhood urchins, newspaper reporters--and even the most rudimentary Google search?

Before you schedule a deposition, do some informal investigation. Next time a new case begins, resist rushing into written discovery and depositions. Step back from the discovery routine--you'll get into that bubble soon enough--and learn a few things on your own.

Twenty years ago, James McElhaney, a gifted lawyer, writer and teacher of trial tactics, and the ABA Litigation Section, first published McElhaney's Trial Notebook, now in its fourth edition.

Discovery, McElhaney noted, is a good way to learn what a witness will say, or to bind a party or witness to a particular version of the facts.

But it is also "a very inefficient way to get information."

Let us add to that:

Full post as published by What About Clients? on July 15, 2010 (boomark / email).