Ways to Help Your Attorney as an Expert Witness during a Deposition

Ways to Help Your Attorney as an Expert Witness during a Deposition

When you understand the legal elements of a case and the attorney's goals, you can help write a useful set of technical questions that can be used to ask the other expert during a deposition.

Writing a well phrased and precise series of questions will help your attorney put the other expert on the spot. This will enable your attorney to solicit the best possible scope of information from the other expert's responses.

By and large, attorneys do not possess the expertise to ask follow-on technical questions if they receive a rambling response. They might not know the answer, and not know what to ask next, and your job is to describe, in English, the gobbledygook. If the other expert has made an error, you can alert your attorney. If the other expert has made an omission, your attorney can ask him to fill in the gap. If the other expert shows a lack of expertise, your attorney can make that obvious with follow-on questions. Finally, your attorney will often need to ask additional questions beyond his initial set. When this happens, your help may be needed to phrase those extra questions precisely. Helping the attorney to phrase technical questions better will make the follow-on questioning more effective.

occasionally, your attorney will not want to wait until a break to obtain this feedback. You may be asked to pass a note if you think of relevant follow-on questions. This approach helps to draw complete responses from other experts. Some believe that playing this part casts you in the role of an advocate rather than an objective aide to the process. I disagree. You are helping the attorney learn fully what the other expert knows or does not know. The attorney decides how to use this newly discovered experience.

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