What is a Deposition Summary?
A deposition summary is an objective, concise digest of the main points of a deposition transcript. The summary identifies important points in the deposition by page and line. “Page-Line” summaries are typically formatted to include columns for (i) page-line; (ii) exhibit; and (iii) summary of testimony.
The transcript to deposition summary ratio is approximately 10:1 pages. Lawyers need not be the persons who prepare deposition summaries. Deposition summaries do not provide subjective legal advice or opinion.
Deposition summaries are simply digests of the testimony presented and are not intended to replace reading the actual transcript. They can be prepared by anyone with a legal background and experience with reviewing depositions with an understanding of transcript formatting.
The purpose of a Deposition Summary is to help attorneys in their perusal of the deposition and guide them to topics of most interest.
Digests that have links to evidence referred to in the deposition speed up the review process and save the time of looking up the evidence whether it be a document, a photograph, a video clip or audio clip.
Depositions are traditionally summarized in an unstructured way using MS Word and containing explanatory text in paragraph form. There are numerous disadvantages and inefficiencies with this method. There are no assigned date ranges, issues or persons that may be filtered and sorted. Searches are not possible across multiple deposition summaries. Traditional summaries also lack links to transcript language, text and exhibits, requiring manual cross-referencing of the summary with the supporting documents.
In our time together we will demonstrate how, with the latest versions of Word, OneNote and Excel, we can create and organize our summary digests.