Depositions are designed to be used both during preparation phase as well as during the deposition.
During the deposition, keep your notes and potential exhibits centralized within one tool, and chat and collaborate with your team in real time. Tracking your exhibits and annotations is straightforward — no need to toggle through different folders or spreadsheets on your computer, because your notes and evidence are already organized within the Deposition space.
This article gives recommendations for how to use an Everlaw Deposition as your deposition is in progress. For detailed instructions on how to use the tools, see our Deposition Preparation article.
For an overview of all the Deposition tools, see our Introduction to Depositions on Everlaw article.
To learn about exporting potential exhibits prior to a deposition, see our Exhibits in Depositions and Drafts article.
Requirements
To access a Deposition, you must meet one of the following:
- Be the creator
- Have Admin permission for Storybuilder
- Have the Deposition shared with you. You can have one of the following permission levels:
- View: View the Deposition, but make no edits
- Edit: View and edit the Deposition. If a user also has Edit or Full Access permission on the Story, they can add evidence to the Deposition.
- Full access: View, edit, share, and delete the deposition. If a user also has Edit or Full Access permission on the Story, they can add evidence to the Deposition.
Before the deposition
Prior to the deposition, do your preparation, such as outlining your questions, in the Prep section of the Deposition. If you have already done your prep outside of Everlaw, you can import your prior work (from a DOCX) into it. Having your outline and drafted questions in Everlaw allows you to leverage the evidence linking and exhibit marking tools within it.
During the deposition: Mark exhibits
As evidence is introduced during a deposition, mark the exhibit numbers in the Evidence panel.
Doing so affords you two major benefits:
- Evidence marked with an exhibit number, and referenced within your Deposition body, is displayed and can be exported from the Exhibits view. This makes it straightforward to export your exhibits along with their designated exhibit numbers.
- When you later upload the completed deposition transcript into the Deposition, any references to that exhibit number within the transcript text are automatically linked to the document and allow you to preview it with just one click, without leaving the transcript.
To learn about marking exhibits, see our Deposition Preparation article.
To learn about exporting exhibits, see our Exhibits in Depositions and Drafts article.
To learn about working with linked exhibits in in a transcript, see our Work with a Deposition Transcript article.
Chat
During a deposition, your team wants to communicate in real time, such as suggesting lines of questioning or pointing out inconsistencies in testimony. The chat panel allows your team to share these thoughts as they arise without interrupting the flow of the deposition.
A particularly useful function built into chat is that any Bates/Control # entered in the chat is automatically linked to the document.
This is helpful if you want to make sure your teammate knows to bring up a particularly salient document. Type its Bates number into the chat and message is a live link that, when selected, opens a preview of the document.
Learn more about the Chat panel in our Deposition Preparation article.
Timer
The Deposition timer is useful for time tracking during your deposition. In particular, you can timestamp chat communications as well as any written notes in your Deposition text body. This allows you to flag and later recall critical moments of the deposition.
Required permissions: Users with Edit or Full Access permissions can pause, stop, and reset the timer. Users with View permission, can see the timer, but cannot start or stop it.
To start the timer, select the play button. Throughout a deposition, you can stop, pause, and reset the timer.
To timestamp a specific note in your text body, use the shortcut “Control + M” on your keyboard.
All chats sent while the timer is running will be timestamped by default.
Use Tasks to organize your deposition followup
If a particular to-do item comes up during the deposition, add and assign it from the Tasks panel.
Using the task panel to track followup items during a deposition means that your post-deposition plan is ready to go as soon as the deposition is complete.
Learn more about Tasks our Deposition Preparation article.