Deposition Objections

Description

This handy softcover guide provides the grounds and language for: attorney-client privilege, attorney work-product privilege, proprietary and confidential information, witness self-incrimination, family communications privileges, privileges for communications with professionals, privacy privilege, legal process privilege, over-broad and burdensome questions, vagueness, ambiguity, repetition, lack of foundation, legal conclusions, and more.

• Verbal and non-verbal coaching of the witness
• Colloquies and stipulations among counsel
• Instructing the witness not to answer
• Disruptive or inappropriate objections
• Production of privileged or confidential documents

Perhaps because depositions are as close to a trial as many cases will get, deposition disputes have grown more heated and difficult to resolve.

Here is a portable and affordable volume that provides practical guidance for resolving many of the more contentious disputes. Joseph A. Ranney’s Deposition Objections offers help with these issues and objections:

Procedural issues

• 13 examples of when it is and when it is not appropriate to ask the court for a supervisory ruling
• When to instead adjourn and move for a protective order
• How to lay the groundwork for a supervisory ruling
• When is it okay to instruct a witness not to answer?
• Techniques for stopping bad attorney behavior at depositions
• Checklist of steps to take before adjourning a deposition
• When are you on safe ground when making a speaking objection?
• Guidelines for responding to a speaking objection
• Sample language for putting stipulations on the record

Grounds for objecting

• The limits of the attorney-client privilege, with checklist of when it does and does not apply: Form 4-1
• What are the limits of work-product immunity?
• How to resolve work-product disputes during a deposition
• Issues in formulating protective orders and common solutions
• Quick-reference chart showing the confines of professional privilege: Form 9-1
• What is the scope of the privacy privilege?
• Making the balancing calculation in legal process privilege objections, with examples. Summary checklist: Form 11-1
• The 5 situations when a relevance objection is proper
• Methods for resolving relevance disputes
• Handling attorneys and witnesses who play the dictionary game
• How many times should you allow a question to be asked?
• Preparing witnesses for loaded questions
• Should you instruct the witness not to answer a legal theory disclosure question?
• Are evidence identification questions allowed? What to consider when making the judgment call
• The line between permissible and impermissible position disclosure questions

REVISION 7 HIGHLIGHTS

Deposition Objections gives you dozens of objections and tactics for confronting and resolving contentious deposition disputes. This edition adds new text, tips, and more than 100+ new cases to help you protect your witness and your case. Revisions and additions include:

CHAPTER 6 • PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION

CHAPTER 10• PRIVACY PRIVILEGE
Exploring Your Opponent’s Use of Social Media Through Depositions (§§ 6:04, 10:04):

• The role that social media posts play in litigation and discovery is steadily increasing. This edition adds
  some of the latest cases that discuss how to balance social media users’ interest in privacy against a
  litigation opponent’s need to secure discoverable information. These cases will help you learn how to use
  deposition objections to protect your client’s privacy interests.

CHAPTER 12 • RELEVANCE, OVERBROAD AND BURDENSOME QUESTIONS
Exploring Your Opponent’s Use of Artificial Intelligence (§§ 12:16, 12:17):

• Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an important feature of litigation as well as other aspects of modern life. This edition contains an overview of AI. It also explains how AIs is (and can be) used in discovery, how you can use deposition questions to find out whether your opponent has used AI to produce information, how to discover any flaws in that AI that may have caused incomplete production, and how you can object to questions probing your client’s use of AI.

CHAPTER 13 • OTHER OBJECTIONS
NEW SECTION! Questions As to Litigation Motives and Propriety
Exploring the Use of “Lawfare” During Depositions (§§ 13:32, 13:33):

•  In our increasingly polarized society, “lawfare” – the use of law and lawsuits to make harassing claims against
  private and political opponents without any real concern for the merits of the claims – has become increasingly
  common. This edition describes the tools you can use to combat such lawsuits. It also discusses the extent to
  which you can explore your opponent’s motives at a deposition and the objections that attorneys of clients
  accused of lawfare can make to such questioning.

And More!