Depositions are fun. Well, fun is a strong word, but interesting. It is very rare that you get 5-10 people into one room and watch a question and answer session between two individuals while it is tape recorded. Unless of course you go to a lot of depositions. Maybe that is the definition of a deposition – 5-10 people, one room, question and answer session, tape recording. The tape recording is very complex – involving microphones and an individual with a mouthpiece, who is the court reporter. The court reporter talks into the mouthpiece and repeats everything that is uttered by both sides of the table and takes notes (at least I think that is what was going on). I had a friend a few years ago that was dating an attorney – my friend was a clerk at the law firm where this attorney worked. And the attorney used to have some sort of past with one a particular court reporter – he had taken her out on a date or something, before he met my friend. Well, my friend the clerk would get kind of paranoid and bothered by her attorney using this particular court reporter – really more irritated than anything. (There is really no point to this story, other than that this is what was going on in my mind during the deposition).
Gosh, I wish I had saved some of those sandwiches from lunch. I wonder if there are any cookies left?
I think depositions are the reason that people don’t like attorneys – because attorneys talk a different language than regular people and so attorney #1 can say something that makes no sense to a regular individual – but that makes total sense to another attorney. But the attorney is going to object to things as a regular guy would understand things, not the way the attorney would understand things.
Attorney #1 is trying to make the person being deposed say something very particular, and Attorney #2 is trying to keep the person being deposed from saying whatever it is that Attorney #1 wants him to say through objections that are very possibly lost on the person being deposed. So you end up having the same question rephrased quite a few times.
It is all very technical, and there seems to be a lot of room for error. But basically it is a whole other language and the regular person who is being deposed ends up feeling rather confused and left out, and we all hate to feel like that.
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