Some Final Preparatory Steps for an Expert Witness in Preparing for Trial Testimony

Some Final Preparatory Steps for an Expert Witness in Preparing for Trial Testimony

The final preparation phase for a trial includes several well-defined steps:

* Reviewing your notes

* Preparing mentally.

* Rereading and refreshing your memory of key documents, reports, and depositions.

* Reviewing the other expert's work and preparing your lawyer with a series of valuable questions that he can ask the opposing expert.

Beyond those steps, you can help by explaining the purpose of any of your questions that may not be self evident to the attorney. And, you can suggest suggestions for follow-on questions that your lawyer can think about using depending on the answers the other expert gives him to the initial set of questions.

You should always start by rereading your own expert report. All attorneys involved in the case will question you about its contents.

Reading your own expert report is an excellent way to refresh your memory about what you concluded, and why you came to those opinions.

Next, open the rest of your file, which should be organized chronologically, and read everything in it. study your notes about meetings, conversations, tests, results, and discoveries. If your case file contains documents that you considered important at the time, reread them.

gnerally, by the time you reach a trial, many depositions have taken place, and you will have taken note of the ones you used to form your opinion. Reread the deposition sections of your expert report to refresh your memory about who said what, how they said it, and in what context they said it.

If you flew around the country or abroad to work on cases, it will not always be practical to revisit locales and relevant sites. If your case is local, however, that may be easy for you to do. Refreshing your memory visually about the location of events can be helpful. If you cannot visit in person, do your best with the photographs you took, recordings you made, and notes you wrote about the site or the people at the site.

It is helpful to create a chart listing the key people involved in the case; you will certainly be asked questions about them and need to know their names and how they fit in the larger scheme of the case. The jurors, judge, and the attorneys will expect you to be familiar with much of what they said, as well as their roles in the case and the opinions you are expressing about them.

Overall, you should be familiar and comfortable with whatever you have committed to paper and included in your case file. Further, the facts and findings that have been discovered by you, or anyone else whose materials you relied on for your final opinions, should be readily available in your mind. By this point, you should be able to give your opinions, present your methods and findings, and answer questions about them without hesitation.

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