A deposition summary contains the most important parts of a witness's testimony.
In civil litigation, depositions contain the verbatim testimony of witnesses taken during pretrial discovery. Depositions provide invaluable evidentiary support for later use at trial. To maximize the helpfulness of documents, including depositions, lawyers often must extract the most immediately relevant information. Thus, deposition summaries are an effective resource for identifying the most pertinent portions of a witness's testimony. A deposition summary is a succinct synopsis of pretrial testimony that is usually less than four pages long. Attorneys often give paralegals the responsibility of summarizing depositions.
Instructions
Read the Deposition
1. Read the deposition critically, in an active, engaged manner. As you read, ask yourself who, what, when, where, and why. If your attorney wants the summary to mention a specific topic or detail, check the index first.
2. Overlook extraneous details. If you need a complete, comprehensive holistic summary, focus on only the most immediately relevant facts. For example, what a person ate for breakfast is irrelevant to the personal injury resulting from medical malpractice. Read with a keen eye and prudent judgment when choosing what to include in the summary.
3. Keep a pen or pencil in hand as you read the document. Lightly mark the paper after each sentence to help you keep track of what you have read. Actively tracking your place in the document will increase your comprehension of the material and will help you stay alert.
4. Brief the deposition. You may want to annotate significant details as you read, to help with the transcription later in the process. If you are comfortable with the material, just keep reading and absorbing the relevant facts. While annotating facts, remember to follow the strategy outlined in Steps 1 and 2.
5. Use critical analysis, logic, and common sense. Read beyond the explicit text of the testimony to recognize assumptions inherent in both the questions and the answers.
6. Recognize the main conclusions presented during testimony, as indicated by statements of opinions by attorneys and witnesses. Include these assessments as a brief statement in your conclusion paragraph.
Transcribe the Information
7. Prepare the deposition summary by transcribing the information you read. If you briefly annotated all the relevant facts, then translating the information will be simple.
8. Reread the deposition. Review all critical pieces of the transcript and any pages with sideline descriptions. Resolve any questions that you have not already answered in your notes.
9. Streamline the presentation of your summary. If you did not need to annotate the material, organize the summary from memory.
10. Open a new document in your word-processing program. Title it "Deposition of {Witness}" and include the date the deposition was taken. Save the document as "Deposition of {Witness}."
11. Begin transcribing all the relevant information from the deposition in clear, concise prose. Keep your sentences simple, succinct, and specific. Save your document frequently to prevent the loss of any significant information.
Tags: deposition summary, relevant facts, Deposition Witness, immediately relevant, most immediately