As you navigate your personal injury case, you’ll need to gather evidence and craft persuasive legal arguments to support your position, but you’ll also have to be ready to deflect and counter aggressive defense arguments. That can sometimes be hard to do since the defense may have several arguments at its disposal, but there are strong steps that you can take to prepare yourself for the battle ahead.
One of them is to educate yourself on and ready yourself for the depositional process. A deposition is the taking of sworn testimony outside of court and before trial, all in hopes of gaining more information, pinning a witness down on their testimony, and highlighting areas of attack.
The defense attorney has a lot of leeway when it comes to what sort of questions to ask, too, meaning that your attorney will have a limited opportunity to object to questions and prevent you from being forced to answer them. That’s why preparation is key.
How can you prepare for a deposition in a personal injury case?
The thought of being grilled by a defense attorney can be extraordinarily stressful. Yet, there are steps you can take now to prepare yourself for the process ahead, hopefully giving you a leg up on the defense and protecting your claim. This includes:
- Knowing the facts: You can count on the defense having a command of the facts. You need to know them just as well, if not better. Otherwise, the defense might find ways to trap you in inconsistencies or demonstrate that you’re to blame for the accident.
- Preparing to only answer the question asked: A lot of car accident victims get themselves into trouble during a deposition because they volunteer information well in excess of what’s actually asked of them. This can give the defense ammunition to use against you at trial that they otherwise wouldn’t have had. So, as you think about going into your deposition, be ready to think before you answer, and then only answer the question that was actually asked.
- Practicing your answers: You probably know where your case is vulnerable. If you can identify those weak spots in your claim, then you’ll be better positioned to anticipate the questions that the defense will ask. Then, you can practice how you’ll answer the toughest questions. This will help you avoid surprises at your deposition and allow you to couch answers in a way that still protects your claim.
- Avoiding arguments: The defense attorney might try to rile you up in hopes that you’ll say something that they can use against you. But don’t let them get under your skin. Since everything you say will be transcribed, getting upset at the defense attorney could be taken out of context and make you look bad.
There are other ways you can prepare for your deposition. Just make sure you know all of your options so that you can use those that make you feel the most comfortable going into yours.
Don’t let the defense take control of your personal injury case
There are a lot of ways in which the defense will try to steer the direction of your case, and all to your detriment. But you can reclaim control of your personal injury claim by gathering compelling evidence, crafting persuasive legal arguments, and avoiding costly mistakes.
If you need assistance in doing any of that, then please research what you can do to surround yourself with support to maximize your chances of winning your case.