Witness testimony is crucial in any lawsuits involving personal injury, medical malpractice, workers’ compensation, or product liability. Anything the witness testifies before the judge after being sworn in is assumed to be valid unless the other side challenges it. Having a witness to testify about the events may be essential to winning a personal injury lawsuit. Witness statement helps to demonstrate the liability and damages.
The witness statement could be an eye witness, familiar witness, or expert witness, depending upon the circumstances of the case.
What is a deposition?
A deposition is a term used to describe the testimony given under oath and recorded in writing by a court-authorized officer, usually outside of court and before trial. During the litigation process, the examiners of both the plaintiff and the defendant will interrogate the witnesses in the lawsuit. The derived witness deposition will be in the form of a question-and-answer conversation.
Though deposition serves as a shred of substantial evidence in a lawsuit, the lengthy conversation cannot be used as such during the trial. The document would be bulky, with data not required for the success of the lawsuit. There comes the role of deposition summaries. Let’s glide through the qualities of good deposition summary services.
What are deposition summaries?
The deposition summary is the crisp and transcript version of the lengthy deposition testimony. It aids the attorneys and the legal team in understanding the vital points pertaining to the subject lawsuit without wasting time digging through the entire deposition testimony.
Role of Deposition Summaries in a Lawsuit
- Deposition summaries help the attorneys during the different phases of litigation like mediation, arbitration, pre-trial, and trial.
- They act as vital documents that help adjusters, plaintiffs, attorneys, or any other parties who were absent during the testimony process.
- Deposition summaries save the attorneys’ time going through the entire deposition document.
- The witnesses can refresh their memory by going through the deposition summaries before participating in the case trial.
- Deposition summaries are considered a piece of solid evidence in court proceedings.
A good deposition summary is never a copy-paste version of the original testimony. The summarizer should present the deposition summary so that the vital points are captured to help all the parties involved in the lawsuit.
Qualities of a Good Deposition Summary
A well-prepared deposition summary is indisputably an asset to the attorneys and the legal team to present their points more clearly throughout the trial. With a quality deposition summary, the attorneys can focus their time on the trial preparation, which would shoulder the lawsuit with better arguments.
Let’s now understand what makes a good deposition summary.
The initial step in preparing a deposition summary is reading the original deposition document. To prepare a precise deposition summary, the summarizer should first do detailed background research about the lawsuit and its circumstances.
The summarizer should carefully understand the allegations and the supporting facts in the testimony. More care should be taken in summarizing depositions of expert witnesses like physicians, medical professionals, accident reconstructionist, or any other experts related to the subject lawsuit. The deposition summary of expert witnesses would comprise strong opinions about the case, which should be carefully analyzed and reflected in the deposition summary.
For instance, the deposition of an expert physician would hold his opinions about the injuries sustained by the claimant, the reasonability of the treatment given, the cost, and future treatment requirements. Such vital points should never be missed in a deposition summary.
While annotating the deposition, the key points should be highlighted without loading the summary with data that does not add value to the strength of the claim. The important points should be prioritized so the reader would better understand without any cross reference.
What if there was a break taken by the witness in between the deposition process? A quality deposition summary should mention it to help the reader quickly grasp the relevant part of the transcript.
A well-written deposition summary would indicate the discrepancies in the depositions like date errors, contradictions in the names of the parties involved, etc. The summarizing expert has to highlight such inconsistencies they come across in the deposition.
Professional deposition summaries should never contain data that are assumptions of the person who does the summarization. The individual describing the deposition’s contents must avoid distorting the testimony’s meaning with personal remarks or opinions.
The original deposition’s lines and pages should match the summary information. A solid deposition summary should highlight crucial testimony and possible reasons to challenge a witness. The summary should be as concise as feasible so that the trial counsel can swiftly summarize the testimony.
Depositions would contain exhibits and other supporting documents relevant to the particular lawsuit. The points that the examiner or the witness discusses about them should be clearly depicted in an expert deposition summary.
Till now, we have been discussing the content of a good deposition summary. Another side of the coin is the presentation of the deposition summary. The arrangement of a deposition summary should dovetail with the requirements of the attorney or the party who uses the document in the lawsuit. This especially comes into play when the deposition summarization process is outsourced to an expert team.
Deposition summaries can be crafted into different structures like page-line, narrative, or chronological formats. The formatting of the deposition summaries would be based on the demand of the reader and the case circumstances.
A document with a lot of information and significant topics can be challenging to analyze and summarize without making mistakes. A quality deposition summary should be prepared without any errors. The summary should be subjected to stringent quality audits before being approved for use in the lawsuit.
The majority of the attorney’s effort would be spent on achieving the aforementioned attributes and creating a solid deposition summary. There comes the importance of outsourcing deposition summaries to companies with expertise.
Thoroughly drafted deposition summaries make it possible to quickly refer to them in court and during the pretrial process. Outsourcing depositions saves time and enables attorneys and paralegals to focus on other case elements. This helps them devote more time to winning the case.