How to Write a Legal Deposition
- 1). Review past statements made by the person being deposed. Often, before a deposition, something called an "interrogatory" is issued. This is a written sheet of questions that gets the basic facts from the witness. This can be reviewed, along with any other statements the witness has made in the past, such as a police report from the scene of the accident or emails sent by the person being deposed. The specifics of where to find past statements is going to vary based on who you are deposing, but in general, it is a good idea to know what has been said before so that you can know what to question the person about.
- 2). Research the law. The purpose of deposing someone is to find out what will be said at trial. This means you need to know what is actually relevant to the case at hand in order to find out what questions to ask. For example, if a person is being deposed in a car accident case about whether the driver of a car that caused the accident was negligent or not, then there are different elements of the law that are important than if a person is being deposed in an insider trading case. Only by knowing what has to be proven, or not proven, in court to win your case can you know what questions to ask.
- 3). Write both specific and open ended questions. Once you know what you are looking for from the witness, you will want to write questions designed to elicit the answers you need about the relevant factors. Sometimes, this means that you will want to ask just a yes or no question so that the witness will be forced to provide a specific kind of information. For example, if you want to know if the person was speeding at the time the accident happened but don't want justifications or excuses, you could write, "Were you speeding?" as the question. On the other hand, in other cases, it is better to have the witness elaborate or explain more, in which case the question would need to be more open ended.
- 4). Plan to improvise. While you can write some questions in advance, the big benefit of a deposition over interrogatory questionnares alone is that a deposition allows you to follow up and to ask more questions about things of interest. Thus, while you can write your deposition ahead of time you should also be prepared to wing it if you need to in order to get to the heart of the legal matter or explore potentially legally significant statements made by the person being deposed.
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