Page 13 - FDCC Deposition Drills

Deposition Drills How to Teach Deposition Skills
How to Teach These Skills
When teaching deposition skills, do it either on a one to one basis or limit it to a small group of young lawyers. Teaching deposition skills to large groups at once is not as effective as a more personal approach. I suggest a ratio, at most, of 1:5 between instructors and students. You don’t necessarily have to have a 1:1 ratio. In fact, teaching through small groups may prove more effective than a one to one approach, because young lawyers not only learn from their own efforts but from the efforts of other young lawyers and from each other’s feedback. Having taught deposition skills in a variety of settings and to a variety of group sizes, I’ve found groups of 4 or 5 young lawyers prove to be the most interactive, effective and fun.
Consider meeting weekly, either first thing in the morning or at lunch, for about an hour, and run through two of more exercises during each session. Create a schedule over several weeks (or even over several months) where you run through some (or if time permits, most, if not all) of the exercises in this book. By the end of the process, the young lawyers will have a new found appreciation of what to do at depositions and how to do it.
How to Fine Tune These Skills
After you’ve run through the exercises and want to do more advanced training with your associates, share depositions you’ve taken and explain, step by step, your preparations for the depositions, why you asked the questions you asked, why you asked them in a given order and how you asked the questions. Consider these sessions master classes – where you get into the weeds and explain the how, why and what of advanced deposition skills. And again, studying
a deposition you took and analyzing what you did will help you improve what you do in future depositions.
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