Paperless depositions

I don't use paper in depositions.  If I'm taking the deposition I cheerfully agree to have the deposition held in my opponent's office, asking him or her to make sure to have the case documents available and organized by bates-number.   If you can't count on an attorney to have lots of paper what can you count on?

I have my deposition notes set up in an outline on my computer.  When I get to a place that calls for me to talk about a certain document I inform my opposing counsel what the document bates-number is, and ask him to show it to the witness.  I have all the documents bookmarked in Acrobat.  It takes me about 3 seconds to get to the document, and I make good use of the time it takes my opponent to pull the document and show it to the witness.  I have notes superimposed on the PDF and I examine those and get ready to frame my questions.  At the end of the deposition I don't offer any documents as exhibits.  If opposing counsel asks me why I'm not doing that I tell him that the bates-numbers (which I announced on the record before starting my questions about each document) constitute sufficient reference.

If I'm attending a deposition it's even easier.  When a document is offered I ask what the bates-number is and I just pull it up, much more quickly than if I were to wait for it to be handed over.  Plus I have my PDF notes superimposed on my copy which helps me quickly figure out the relevance of the document to my theory of the case.   And of course I can add more notes on the fly if I want to.  I also bookmark the document and indent it under a main bookmark labelled for the deposition in question.  So when the deposition is over I have a listing of all the documents that were referenced in that meeting.

It's not as high-tech as this paperless deposition system, but it doesn't need to be.  Often the best solution is the simplest one, and I think that's true for Adobe Acrobat.  It does a lot of things pretty darn well, and since I use it all the time I'm very familiar with its organization.  Next time you take a deposition consider how much smoother it could be if you didn't have to deal with paper. 

Of course, if you have a deposition like this one it wouldn't matter.

Comments

[Jonathan]

Out of curiosity, does your venue require that all discovery and production be bates stamped?

[Ernie]

No, it doesn't. But I bates stamp all my outgoing stuff and in the rare case where I get stuff from opposing counsel that isn't bates-stamped I go ahead and bates that stuff. At a depo in that situation I would refer to the doc by name or date and then to my bates number. That's all I need to figure out what the document is later on. Or at least which version of the document I was dealing with. I can't make the other side do a good job of keeping track of documents (and I don't want to), but I can control my universe (and I do).

[Tom O'Connor]

Ernie: this brings to mind a discussion you and I have had several times. One of the ongoing objections to using PDF that I receive when I'm consulting with trial attorneys is the alleged ease of using single page TIFF images rather than a multi page PDF.
The argument goes something like this: "PDF Bates numbering only helps me find a document not a specific page within the document. If I have 3 bankers boxes of documents with Bates numbers and I scan them to PDF, I can't jump to page 214 of a 700 page document if counsel in a dep or hearing is introducing that page only. It is too unwieldy to have to use PDF and start at page one of that document and page down to the section being introduced. Since single page TIFFs allow me to do that, I'm sticking with them."
I heard this exact position yesterday on a conference call with the lit support manager of a large Chicago firm who had a construction defect case with productions involving multiple documents of several hundred pages in length. Is this really accurate? Is there no way to jump directly to a specific page in a multi-page PDF? Does it matter if the doc's were scanned with the Bates numbers already on them or Bates numbering is done in Adobe after the fact?

[Ernie]

There is a way to jump to a specific page number in a PDF. It's called the 'Go to Page' feature. The little box in Acrobat, or Reader for that matter, that has the current page number is a text entry box. Enter another page number and hit 'ENTER' and you'll go to that page. Now, that's only step one. That's how you navigate in any old PDF, but what about when you have lots of documents that have been bates stamped? At some point you're going to have too many documents to put into one PDF. That is, you can but the PDF will be so huge that it will make the computer slow down and make navigating tediously slow.

What then? Well, put the documents into separate PDFs. The first PDF will be called, say, Bates 0001—1000. Navigating this one will require no set up. If opponent shows a witness document with bates number 0725, then you just enter '725' into the aforementioned text box and hit enter. Boom! You're on page 725. But what happens if your worthy opponent calls for document number 1475? That will be in the PDF file called Bates 1001—2000. And when you hit '1475' nothing will happen because Acrobat doesn't have a page number that high. It thinks that the last page is page # 1000. So what do you do?

Easy. When you first create the file called Bates 1001—2000 you should renumber it, which is easy to do in Acrobat. You just tell Acrobat that it should consider page 1 to be page 1001 and then renumber all the succeeding pages accordingly. Then when you open it up and type 1475 it will go to the document with bates number 1475. Most cases don't have a 100,000 documents, so this system works well in most cases. At some point you'll find a case where this won't work, but at least you'll understand the power of being able to find documents quickly at a deposition and you'll make whatever adjustment you need to make to ensure that you have this important capability.

Most attorneys have two problems: (1) they don't know how to make it so that they can have digital documents at their fingertips, and (2) they don't even know that it's a good idea. The real barrier for the legal profession is #2. But that's an advantage to a lawyer who does know how to access digital information. I believe in the business world they call people who take advantage of such disparities "arbitrageurs."

[M. Sean Fosmire]

There are advantages to multi-page PDFs and then there are different advantages to multiple single-page documents. The single pages, for instance, work much better when using a document search tool such as X1 or dtSearch.

You can get the best of both worlds by separating out a multi-page PDF file after applying needed annotations. A good technical term for it is "busting it up". If I have a technical report consisting of 175 pages, I will Bates-stamp it (using the Bates tool under Acrobat 8) and then I will often "bust it up" into 175 separate PDFs, contained in a separate folder. The Bates numbers carry through.

Now I have two different versions, so that I can use each to its best advantage.