I've been making efforts to learn how to use my iPad as a tool and resource at work instead of simply using it for personal things. I’ve discovered some great stuff, some bad stuff, and some stuff in between. I thought I would take this opportunity to share this knowledge with you in case you were interested. Here is this week's iPad App of the Week for Lawyers: The Deponent ($9.99)
Category: Outlining
Grade: C
Category: Outlining
Grade: C
The idea of The Deponent app is to provide lawyers with a good resource for preparing for and taking depositions. The idea, however, is better than the reality, and the app falls short of giving lawyers a practical tool for their arsenals—especially for what it costs.
In simple terms, The Deponent allows lawyers to create outlines for their depositions. The app comes with 150 pre-made questions from different broad categories of deposition taking (i.e. Plaintiff’s attorney, assumptions, experts, qualifications, admonitions, etc). It also allows you to create new questions and categories, which will then be added to the pre-made list. If you touch a question with your finger, it will go into your deposition outline. From the deposition outline, you can edit the question in order to make it more specific to the facts of the deposition you are taking. The app also allows you to attach exhibits to specific questions for reference. The idea is to then take your outline to the depo and ask away, going from pre-made question to pre-made question like a script.
This may be a good app for new lawyers to toy with so that they can see what kinds of questions are asked in a deposition and how they are asked. It might also help lawyers create simple outlines for simple witnesses or help them organize the order in which they might ask certain questions. If you have some time on your hands, it could help you create a database of categories and questions that you might ask in any number of given situations.
In all honesty, however, I do not think the app’s set-up is very helpful. First, the pre-made questions and categories are very broad and scattered; due to the fact that most cases are very fact specific, I have little doubt that lawyers would find themselves spending more time creating new questions and editing pre-made questions in their outline than they would if they were simply using Word, Pages or even a traditional legal pad to outline it from scratch. Attaching electronic exhibits to specific questions is a neat concept, but not a sensible one; real copies will need to be handed out and marked at the deposition anyway, so the only practical use for this tool is for personal review. Finally, I’m not a huge fan of an outline that is designed around and relies on question by question scripting. In practice, depositions do not run like a script and things might not happen in the exact way that the lawyer had planned for. A deposition outline should allow for flexibility and The Deponent’s structure tends to encourage firmness.
In short, there is no shortcut around deposition preparation, and an outline should be done from scratch so that it makes sense with the specific facts of your case and at least attempts to accomplish the specific goals that you intend to get out of the deposition. With an iPad, my suggestion would be to use Pages for preparing and outlining your depositions. Once you are finished with your outline, you can put it into your Dropbox, where it can then be accessed from any computer that you have downloaded Dropbox on. From your computer, you can save it into your “deposition database” folder, and suddenly you have started creating a personalized deposition database that is more specific for your practice and for your needs.
Have other questions about using the iPad in your legal practice? Email Matt Schmidt and he will be happy to answer your questions.
