What You Should Know About how Lawyers Conduct Depositions

You might be afraid of what will happen at your deposition, but you need not worry. Your lawyer from your West Palm Beach personal injury law office will be there and will have prepared you beforehand for what you can expect. Lawyers use a variety of questioning techniques at depositions, all designed to get at the facts of the case and try to expose inconsistencies. For this reason, the best strategy is to be honest about what happened during your West Palm Beach personal injury accidents.

Here are some things you should know about how any West Palm Beach personal injury accidents attorney will phrase questions when deposing witnesses:

• Open-ended questions mean the attorney is trying to get information;
• Leading or closed-ended questions mean the West Palm Beach personal injury law office attorney is trying to pin a witness down and commit to a specific fact; and
• Attorneys usually try to keep questions self-contained so that they don’t need to remember all the questions that came before in order to answer. Most West Palm Beach personal injury law office attorneys will not want to confuse the witness.

Sometimes a West Palm Beach personal injury law office attorney will phrase a question vaguely or incorrectly, at which point he might say “strike that” and start over with the question again. Don’t be alarmed as this is just a manner of clarifying a question.

Some witnesses think they are smarter than the West Palm Beach personal injury law office attorney deposing them and can trick them. It might happen from time to time at trial, but don’t try it during deposition.

The goal of any West Palm Beach personal injury law office attorney at deposition is to simply find out what the witness knows and remembers about the events in question, and what they can say regarding the West Palm Beach personal injury accidents that occurred. This means that the attorney will not be “outsmarted” because he is just gathering information and not trying to make a particular argument.

Be prepared for your personal injury deposition. Get help from an experienced West Palm Beach personal injury law office. Call Jessica Mishali at (561) 833-2772.