Why depositions are so hard
A deposition is a strange event. You sit in a conference room with a court reporter, your attorney and an opposing attorney whose job is to get you to say things that help their client. There is no judge, no jury and no decision at the end. And yet for most defendants it is the worst day of the case, because everything in it is designed to activate a threat response: a hostile questioner, no control over the pace, hours of sustained attention, and the knowledge that every word is being recorded for use against you.
Under those conditions the body does what bodies do. Heart rate rises. Breath gets shallow and fast. Fine motor control and working memory degrade. The prefrontal cortex, which is where careful, slow answers come from, gets less blood. And the instinct that takes over is the worst possible one for a witness: explain, defend, persuade.
What anxiety does to a witness
- You talk too much. Anxious witnesses answer the question they fear, not the question that was asked, and then keep going. Every extra sentence is a new door for the questioner.
- You speed up. Fast answers sound evasive and produce mistakes. Slow answers sound considered.
- You guess. "I don't recall" and "I don't know" feel like failure under threat, so witnesses fill the gap with a guess that becomes testimony.
- You get angry. Usually around hour three, usually at a question that implies you were careless. The transcript does not show that the question was unfair. It shows that you lost composure.
- You stop listening. Threat narrows attention. Witnesses answer a question that was almost, but not quite, the question asked.
Calm, slow, brief.
The three qualities defense attorneys ask for most and get least. All three are states of the body before they are choices of the mind.
The practices that work
These are the core of the deposition component of the Legal Trauma Recovery Method™. They are trained in the Executive Retreat and in private sessions, usually in the weeks before a scheduled deposition.
- Settle before you walk in. A grounding practice, trained daily for two weeks beforehand so it is reliable on the day: in the car, in the hallway, in every break. It puts you somewhere in the room the questioner cannot reach.
- Every question becomes the reminder. The hostile question is a trigger. Trained, it becomes the cue to settle before you answer. The pause gives your attorney time to object and your judgment time to arrive. It feels like an eternity. On the transcript it is invisible.
- Don't bite the hook. The short answer, trained out loud under mild pressure until it is the default: yes, no, I don't recall, I don't know, could you repeat the question. The first thing that comes to mind is the hurtful one. Contain the knee-jerk. Respond from choice, not compulsion.
- Train the trigger question. Everyone has the question that will make them angry. Find it beforehand with your attorney's help, and practice hearing it while staying settled, so the charge becomes fuel instead of being vented or swallowed.
- Build the boundary. Built in the weeks before, so that attacks land on a boundary, not on you. Inside, you are intact. Outside, the storm.
- Be the one who watches. They can take your documents and your testimony. The one who watches cannot be sued, and the one who watches answers slowly.
- Plan the recovery. The day after a deposition is often worse than the day of. Know that in advance and clear the calendar.
What we do and do not do
We do not discuss the facts of your case, we do not coach your testimony, and we do not give legal advice. Those are your attorney's job and we stay well clear of them, which also keeps our work outside the scope of discovery. What we train is the state you are in while your attorney's preparation does its work: a settled body, a steady voice, and the attention to hear exactly the question that was asked.
For attorneys
If you have a client who will be a poor witness because of anxiety rather than facts, we are the referral. We coordinate with defense counsel on timing and never touch substance. See refer a client.