Depositions in Employment Rights Cases
At our law firm, we focus on representing employees. In these cases, we usually find ourselves up against a very large corporation with a lot more money to play with. The employers usually hire a big law firm with hundreds of lawyers. Even though the employers might have more money, in today's economy both sides need to focus on efficiency.
Today in the What About Clients blog (aka What About Paris?), the post is "Depositions: Quit wasting time and money." The point of this post obviously is that depositions are often a waste of resources. I could not agree more. Since we represent the economically distressed employee, we often limit our depositions and try to take short depositions or no deposition at all. The company lawyers, on the other hand, often take longer depositions.
In the What About Clients post, they ask "Why use deposition time to learn things you and yours can learn quickly and inexpensively and lash together from: Phone calls, live humans, your client, client employees, ex-girlfriends, ex-husbands, ex-bosses, bartenders, town drunks, libraries, American Legion halls, store clerks, hopeless gossips, old dudes in cafes who drool on their shirts, neighborhood urchins, newspaper reporters--and even the most rudimentary Google search?"
In law school, they don't teach you to go out and talk to old dudes in cafes or town drunks, instead they focus on the books. Upon graduation, lawyers (myself included) find ourselves in suits and fancy office buildings surrounded by people just like them. So instead of going out and digging around to learn the facts, they just take depositions in the antiseptic environment of a law firm conference room. Sadly, the real story rarely comes out. It is not a natural environment that lends to open communication.
The point is that we (as lawyers) could probably do a better job of finding the truth if we stepped out of our comfort zones and looked under the rocks for information. Depositions are rarely efficient and don't always elicit the whole truth.
