With the term coming to an end, this was a nice deposition to come back around to. The reporter was Shirley, who was the second reporter I went out with overall. It was a bankruptcy-type depo, but fortunately with just two attorneys present. The speed was fairly reasonable -- sometimes a bit much, but usually okay, and probably if I'd had a tape recorder running I could have transcribed it reasonably well.
It's funny how things go sometimes, though. The deponent kept referring to initials -- FFS? FSF? Something hard to distinguish. The attorney clarified what that stood for, but either it was in one ear and out the fingers or else I just missed it entirely (I couldn't stop to check my notes, of course), because I continued to mishear what the initials were. Near the end of the depo, the issue came up again. "A-ha!" I thought to myself, "Here's my chance!" And doggone if it didn't just plain slip past me again! Grrrrr!
Of course, as has happened before, I felt that a lot of times I missed stuff because I couldn't hear it well enough. As an intern, it was not my place to be in the prime seating, since it didn't matter so much if I dropped. In this case, both the deponent and the questioning attorney had very moderate, gentle voices that didn't carry particularly well.
It was a delight, as always, to see Shirley, and if I decide to get a professional writer instead of the laptop-student writer combo, it will be at least in part due to the image of Shirley zipping through her marks to check spellings with the attorneys and the witnesses. She is also a strong proponent of using a tape recorder for a backup -- an idea espoused by every reporter but one that I went out with. You may not need to use it, they chorused, but at least you have the option.
This was probably the first deposition where I felt I had the chance to look at the documents. (Previously, either there weren't exhibits marked, or else they were not accessible to me.) Boy, you can get a lot of informatin from those durned things! As a paralegal, I was experienced in checking out for certain discrepencies, like, for examle, an odd capital letter in the middle of a high-tech name.
Lessons Learned:You can't really relax, exactly, during a depo, no matter how well it's going.
Get as much information from documents and exhibits as you can.
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