Coparent Academy Podcast
Lifechanging Coparenting
Coparent Academy Podcast
#184 - How to Get the Most Out of Your Coparent's Deposition Testimony
You paid for the deposition, now make it count! The deposition transcript is one of the most expensive and important documents in your family law case. Attorney Ron Gore explains how you, the client, can maximize its value by assisting your attorney in a highly organized way. This video outlines how to:
- Read the transcript strategically (twice!).
- Organize notes by specific litigation issues.
- Identify three key categories: admissions, provable lies/mistakes, and negative facts for your side.
- Identify the communications, documents, recordings, and witnesses that will help your attorney take the next steps.
Learn the essential process of using page and line number references and setting up a structured folder system to prepare your case for settlement or trial. Don't let your investment go to waste!
Notice: This is coparenting and legal education not legal advice. For legal advice consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction to discuss the details of your case.
#DepositionTranscript #FamilyLawStrategy #LegalEvidence
If you're in family law litigation and your co-parent was deposed, now you've got this document, the deposition transcript, that costs you a lot of money to get, and it's important to know how to use it. I'm Ron Gore, I'm co-founder of Co-Parent Academy. I'm a family law attorney, and today we're going to talk about how to make the most of the deposition transcript you've received. If you have a deposition transcript in a family law case, you have spent thousands of dollars to get that document and you don't want it to go to waste. Part of you is probably not even sure your attorney is going to read the whole thing, and so you're wondering, what did I do all of this for? If you're feeling that way, the best thing that you can do is to assist your attorney in getting the most out of that transcript. So here's how you do it. First thing is you're going to read the transcript through in its entirety one time. That's going to help you get used to the language of the deposition. It's going to help you follow what's going on. Once you have read it through one time in its entirety, now you're going to be more comfortable with it. And as you go back through a second time, you're going to be able to pick things out that maybe you didn't quite notice because you had the cognitive overload of just dealing with a transcript that you've never seen before in the first place. Next, hopefully you prepared with your attorney in advance of the deposition a list of the litigation issues that were supposed to be covered. If you have that list of issues to be litigated, now you're going to take that list of issues to be litigated and you're going to read back through the deposition transcript and you're going to be making notes that are organized by those issues to be litigated. It's possible that some content is going to touch on more than one issue to be litigated, and that's totally okay. Just make sure that you note that as well. As you go through the transcript, you're going to see that there are page numbers and then there's line numbers as well. Whenever you're referencing something in the transcript to make notes for your attorney, you're going to have the page number and then the line number range, the line where it starts and the line where it ends. That way your attorney knows precisely where to look and you don't have to copy everything verbatim. You can say, hey, here's a description of the thing that I want you to pay attention to, and this is where you can find it. As you go through the transcript, you're going to find that there are different categories of information that can be helpful to you. You're going to find that there are some things that they admitted that are harmful to them and support your point. You're going to find that there are some areas in which they have lied in a way that is easily provable or at least misspoken in a way that's easily provable. You're going to want to document both of those things. You're also going to have in the transcript probably some areas that weren't great for you. If you're a human being, you probably haven't been perfect. So you want to capture for each of the issues to be litigated each of these things. Statements that are very helpful for you, just inherently, statements that are false that you can prove are false, and statements that were not great for you. Now, if they have said something that is untrue, you have to wonder whether it's a lie or a mistake. If it's something that seems more clearly to be a lie than just a misstatement, then ask yourself, how can I prove it? Is there a recording? Is there a photograph? Is there a text message? Is there some other document? Is there a person who can help explain that that's a false statement? Isolate each false statement by page number and line reference and start identifying the evidence that can be used to show that it's false and how it's false. I would organize this information like you did before into a Dropbox or maybe a Google Drive and have it by litigation issue and have it by statement that's important. I would have a document that lists everything. If there is a document recording or something that shows that that statement was false, you want to have a separate subfolder that is referenced in the main document. If you have that sort of structure, that organization, your attorney can look at it and compare, yep, that's the statement. That's the document that shows that it was false. And now, if this is going to trial, your attorney will be able to set some traps to reveal the lack of credibility for the court. Lots of things that they can do with that. If the way that you're going to prove that the statement is false is some other witness, now you have to ask yourself, is that person willing to come to court, swear under oath, and testify against your co-parent about this thing? This should prompt in your mind, you know, is this a small thing or a big thing? Is it a little lie that, you know, shows that they don't have a lot of credibility, but it isn't world-changing? Is it something that you're willing to ask a friend or family member to come into court to miss work, to have to sit in front of your co-parent who they may have to have dealings with in the future and testify against them? If it's something that big, that important to your child's well-being, then sure, you you have to ask them to do the right thing. But this should make you pause and consider for yourself, are you being petty? Is this a small thing or is this an important thing? It's important to make that distinction early on. And then you need to contact the witness and ask them, hey, would you be willing to come to court to testify for me? If so, then they need to be open first to speaking with your attorney. Your attorney should be vetting everything that you're telling them, including your allegation that this statement was false and this person can prove it. An attorney prior to trial should be talking with all of these witnesses to make sure that they know exactly what's going to be said. If there was information that wasn't a false statement, but it was a statement that was inherently bad for them, and you have some additional documentation maybe to back that up, that that's one of their characteristics, then you similarly want to create a folder structure for that. Again, you're going to have your sheet, you're going to have the what the statement was, where to find it in the transcript, and a folder that has the additional materials that help the attorney go further down that road of showing that this is a problem for your co-parent in terms of being a reliable parent for the court to think about entrusting with some level of custody. Similarly, if something came out in the deposition that was negative for you, you need to provide your attorney with everything that relates to that. Especially if you haven't let them know about it before, which you should have. Now that this has come up in the deposition, you have to really disclose everything. You have to make sure that if there's a text message, a document, a recording that you're aware of, if you have a copy of it, you've got to get it and you've got to provide it to your attorney. Your attorney needs to do a threat assessment of that. You know, what is this information? Is this something that can really hurt our litigation chances? If so, it may be something that causes a recalibration of your litigation strategy. It may be something where your attorney says, hey, you know, we thought we were in position X in terms of negotiations and litigation. This means we're in position Y. We're not quite the same place we thought we were before. And because we're in a different place, we need to act differently in how we're conducting this litigation and what our negotiation strategy is. So full disclosure, following up, providing your attorney with all of the information, good and bad, all of the documents so they have it at a fingertip and an organized fashion is the absolute best way to make the most of that expensive deposition transcript that you've got. Hopefully, you found this information to be helpful. If it was, please like, share, subscribe, all that stuff so that other people can see it too. If you have had a deposition and you've gone through a deposition transcript and there was something that just kind of blew your mind in the process, something that you thought was really interesting or helpful for your case, or something that just really changed your perspective on the litigation, I would love for you to leave a comment and tell us all about it. Please anonymize the information. No names, especially no names of children. Just please make sure that if you're going to share that information, you do it in a way that is not going to lead to hurting yourself or in any way hurting your child. But we would love to know, generally speaking, what that experience was for you so that other people can see it too. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you have a great day.