Deposition summaries are a great way to not only avoid spending hours reading through a deposition transcript but also to save hundreds if not thousands of dollars by shifting the work to your legal assistants. Here are 7 benefits of using deposition summaries:
- It helps you stay organized.
- It provides a snapshot of your case—a good resource if you’re away from your office and need to get up to speed quickly on what’s happening in your case.
- It helps you stay on track during trial—you can use it to remind yourself of where you are in the case, which witnesses have testified and which ones haven’t yet, etc.
- You can use it to check the accuracy of your transcript or remind yourself of something that was said but not included in the transcript (e.g., an objection).
- It makes it easier for someone else who doesn’t know anything about your case to understand what’s going on and keep up with it when they’re reading through documents later on down the road (e.g., a new associate).
- You can easily pull quotes from depositions that support your arguments without having to flip through hundreds of pages of testimony transcripts looking for them!
- They allow you to share important information with other people involved in your case, including your client, legal team, and others who need to know what happened during the deposition.
- They can be used as evidence at trial if necessary so long as they’re prepared correctly.
- They help reduce liability by keeping evidence organized and accessible for future use.
- They can be used for discovery purposes—for example, if you’re deposing someone but later need access to their testimony for another case or deposition, you can use a summation from an earlier date instead of having them come back again for another deposition session altogether! This saves both time and money for everyone involved with this process (including those who have already gone through the process once before).
Bottomline
In the end, there are enough benefits to using a deposition summary to justify the extra time and effort you put into them. They’re not always easy to create, but if you represent a plaintiff in a court of law, or if you have been deposed as a witness for your company, these deposition summaries could make all the difference in the suit—or in your own defense.
