Why I Hate Wednesdays
I was having a pretty good day yesterday. I got a lot of studying done in the morning, corporations was short, and the weather was nice. And then, Pretrial. The class itself was fine if not incredibly boring. Three hours of watching other people depose witnesses. Boring. But I can handle boring.
At the end of class, the adjunct handed back the deposition outlines we turned in last week. Needless to say, my outline was poorly scored. Now I didn't put a whole lot of work into it, but I did sit down for about half an hour and outline what areas I needed to cover with the deponent. I didn't write down any specific questions because the adjunct told us not to. I just wrote down the basic areas to cover and a couple notes about specific lines of inquiry I thought would be promising.
Now a bit about deposition outlines. They are not court documents. There is no specific procedure to follow when preparing one. The only person who would ever see your outline in actual practice is you. Its sole purpose is to help guide your questioning in the deposition.
That being said, during the actual depositions last week, I was the only person in my group who filled the allotted time. I took the whole twenty-five minutes and I could have kept going. I elicited a fair amount of information and caught the deponent in a couple of misstatements.
Now I ask you, If the sole purpose of a deposition outline is to aid you in your deposition, and your deposition goes extremely well, doesn't it follow that the outline was written exactly as well as it should have been? Should actual performance during a deposition not shed some light on the quality of the outline?
GODDAMNED RIGHT IT SHOULD!!!!!!!!!!
Apparently, though, it does not.
By the way, for a really disturbing and actually relevant story, read Arfanser today.
At the end of class, the adjunct handed back the deposition outlines we turned in last week. Needless to say, my outline was poorly scored. Now I didn't put a whole lot of work into it, but I did sit down for about half an hour and outline what areas I needed to cover with the deponent. I didn't write down any specific questions because the adjunct told us not to. I just wrote down the basic areas to cover and a couple notes about specific lines of inquiry I thought would be promising.
Now a bit about deposition outlines. They are not court documents. There is no specific procedure to follow when preparing one. The only person who would ever see your outline in actual practice is you. Its sole purpose is to help guide your questioning in the deposition.
That being said, during the actual depositions last week, I was the only person in my group who filled the allotted time. I took the whole twenty-five minutes and I could have kept going. I elicited a fair amount of information and caught the deponent in a couple of misstatements.
Now I ask you, If the sole purpose of a deposition outline is to aid you in your deposition, and your deposition goes extremely well, doesn't it follow that the outline was written exactly as well as it should have been? Should actual performance during a deposition not shed some light on the quality of the outline?
GODDAMNED RIGHT IT SHOULD!!!!!!!!!!
Apparently, though, it does not.
By the way, for a really disturbing and actually relevant story, read Arfanser today.
posted by Fishfrog at 7:13 AM
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