GREAT ADVERSE DEPOSITIONS:
PRINCIPLES AND PRINCIPAL TECHNIQUES
(presentations of 2 to 6.5 hours of teaching time)
8:30 - 10:00 a.m. (the 6.5-hour agenda)
- Deposition cross-examination: an intellectually rigorous discipline
- Battleships: the checklist of recurring deposition questions re recurring issues
- Four nearly everybody-agrees deposition cross-examination rules
- Grand Unified Theory of civil litigation
- Rationale re saving attacks for surprise at trial
- The cut-to-the-chase, can't-be-beat argument vs. the stupidest orthodoxy
- Whack! defined & demonstrated
- Five advantages: deposition cross-examiner vs. trial cross-examiner
- A famous cross-examination analyzed
- Introduction of The Magnificent Seven
- When to ask leading questions in deposition
10:00 - 10:10 a.m. Break
10:10 - 11:20 a.m.
- Exceptions to the leading question rule
- When the truth is not nearly enough
- Bluffing deponent into an admission
- Deponent's escapes from answers to leading questions
- Using rhetoric to intensify arguments
- A 2nd famous cross-examination analyzed
- Reasoning questions
- Firewalling introduced
- Interrogatory-like questions
11:20 - 11:30 a.m. Break
11:30 - 12:30 p.m.
- Universal questions
- A 3rd famous cross-examination analyzed
- Enumeration
- Looping
- Identifying a mediocre deposition in only 60 seconds
- Making the implied/hidden express: using lexicography
12:30 - 1:30 p.m. Lunch
1:30 - 2:50 p.m.
- Making the implied/hidden express: using logic
- The transfer of information rule & the most common dumb deposition question.
- Crap defined
- Attacking narrow questions & question-dodging with HS English skills
- Attacking 2 answers in 1 question
- Attacking the needle & the haystack answer
2:50 - 3:00 p.m. Break
3:00 - 4:30 p.m.
- More re "wisdom" of saving attacks for surprise at trial
- The whole nine yards question
- Sixteen potential escapes from cross-examiner's deception argument
- Conducting interviews vs. taking great adverse depositions
- Coda