Creating an Expert Deposition Summary

Updated 7/18/2024

When preparing for trial, depositions play a foundational role critical to the discovery phase. After the deposition is conducted, a succinct, accurate deposition summary is a strategic component of developing and refining case strategies. However, it can be a time-consuming challenge to summarize effectively, as depositions are often lengthy and full of case-critical information.

As witnesses and involved parties are interviewed, they share key testimony that informs trial strategies. Depositions are rich with details, and while they’re typically limited to a seven-hour period, cases often involve multiple depositions. This leaves attorneys with several deposition transcripts filled with content that must be assessed, analyzed, and positioned correctly. 

Instead of combing through time-consuming and dense transcripts over and over again, you can use a deposition summary, which highlights the key points and testimony of a deposition.

Understanding Deposition Summaries

As noted above, the deposition process happens during the discovery phase, before a civil lawsuit or criminal case occurs. This is the formal stage of investigation where both sides conduct legal research and gather information. During a deposition, witnesses from either side are sworn in and questioned.

The purpose of depositions is to:  

• Prepare for trial or settlement – Legal teams use depositions to avoid surprises and confusion during a trial, help lawyers decide on legal strategies, or provide the basis to negotiate settlements. They’re critical to accurate and effective litigation preparation.

• Preserve testimony – Depositions are used to document information under oath and to secure testimony if a material witness is unwilling (or unable) to testify during the trial. Beyond prep, they facilitate an accurate record to be used throughout the case.

• Impeach witnesses – Depositions are also used to impeach witnesses who contradict their own sworn testimony in court, for example, due to inconsistencies in their original testimony. They empower key legal moves that can turn the tide in any given case.

But afterward, there is a final edit and document review, and an official transcript is then completed and certified. This official transcript is then reviewed by attorneys, discussed with clients, and incorporated into trial or settlement planning.

The Real Value of Deposition Summaries

As you can likely imagine, deposition transcripts can be lengthy, and continuously combing through them can be a laborious and time-consuming process for attorneys. Three-quarters of lawyers already report spending upwards of 20 hours per week on non-client-facing work.¹

Instead of spending valuable time searching through hundreds or even thousands of pages of deposition documents, you can instead refer to an expert deposition summary, which is a concise document that captures all of the key points from a deposition transcript.

Summarizing depositions becomes especially relevant for cases with lengthy deposition transcripts. Accurate deposition summaries focus on the witness’ main testimonies, conclusions, and supporting reasoning. Concise summaries are much shorter than the full transcript, and are designed to be a condensed, quick reference tool for lawyers to understand the essence of the testimony that was given. They allow more time to be spent on non-rote tasks, like deep legal analysis.

These benefits are magnified further when the deposition summary process itself is automated or otherwise supported with artificial intelligence (AI) tools—more on how this works below.

How to Write a Comprehensive Deposition Summary

After a deposition is held, a deposition transcript is generated. From there, you can take steps to write a comprehensive, articulate, and ultimately helpful deposition summary based on the entire transcript. Here’s what you’ll need to do to craft a deposition summary:

1. Gather the Raw Materials

A deposition transcript or video recording is the foundation of your deposition summary. This is the verbatim record of the testimony, including all questions asked by attorneys. Your deposition summary will typically start with the full transcript or recording. 

Other helpful materials include key case documents, such as the complaint and motions, which can inform your understanding of the legal arguments at play. Additionally, you should check for exhibits that were introduced to support testimony in a deposition and ensure you have a complete understanding of them. 

2. Outline Essential Details 

Next, you can set the stage for your deposition summary with key details. Briefly identify the case, the parties involved, and the witness. Then, dive into the body of your deposition summary, focusing on the witness’ opinions and supporting details. Specifically, identify the main points and central opinions, and unpack the rationale behind them. 

During this stage, you’ll also likely want to keep things concise.

Depositions can quickly become wordy and balloon in length. You’ll save yourself hours of future work by keeping your summary brief and focused. Doing so will ensure you create concise summaries containing the most relevant information.

3. Leverage Structure and Formatting

Less a distinct step than a consideration throughout the process: use a format or templates that your readers are familiar with. Deposition summaries are intended for quick reference, and they’re hallmarked by their ease of use. Keep this in mind when creating your deposition summary, and utilize formatting such as bullet points and numbered lists for easy reference. 

You might consider soliciting a format from your readers or sharing it prior to submission to confirm that it’s easily navigable. A summary that’s hard to parse is almost useless.

4. Keep Best Practices in Mind

When crafting your deposition summary, certain best practices can be helpful.

For example, remember that accuracy is paramount, as this summary informs critical legal decisions. Double-check all quotes and information against the transcript to ensure a reliable summary. Also, in a deposition summary, information hierarchy is essential. Prioritize information based on relevance to your specific case, keeping critical data more visible.

5. Outsource and Automate

Another process-spanning consideration is using all legal services and technological tools at your disposal to facilitate the repetitive and rote parts of the process to free up resources for more demanding technical aspects. For example, you can leverage generative AI (Gen AI) and large language models (LLMs) to automate baseline summarization, which empowers your sharpest legal minds to focus more of their attention on analysis, strategy, recommendations, and other key tasks.

In addition, AI tools aren’t only for generating summaries. They can also be used to edit, process, and perform basic analytic functions on summaries for fundamental litigation support and strategic purposes.

Common Challenges in Deposition Summarization

Deposition summarization is central to trials and settlements, but it’s not without its challenges, even for the most skillful attorneys. Common challenges in deposition summarization include:

1. Sifting through volume – Depositions can result in lengthy transcripts filled with technical details, irrelevant discussions, and objections. Identifying the key points requires careful analysis and the capacity to comb through large datasets.

2. Maintaining accuracy – Summarizing deposition information accurately is critical. You’ll need to verify all quotes and information against the transcript and work to represent what occurred objectively. At volume, this can be difficult, and even one small error could cascade into tremendous legal consequences.

3. Identifying relevance – Not everything discussed in a deposition is equally important to the case. It can be challenging and time-consuming to distinguish between relevant details and extraneous information.

4. Striking balance – While concise, a deposition summary still needs to capture the essence of the testimony, while avoiding being bogged down by excessive details. Striking this balance between comprehensive and succinct can be challenging.

5. Dedicating resources – Deposition summaries might be in the wheelhouse of most attorneys, but they’re often time-consuming and laborious to create. It can take considerable time and resources to create deposition summaries. 

These are all reasons that many effective practices opt to bring in outside help for gathering information for, drafting, analyzing, editing, and operationalizing deposition summaries.

Benefits of Outsourcing Deposition Summary Services

While creating deposition summaries in-house can be achievable, there are significant advantages to outsourcing this task to highly specialized legal service providers. 

Here’s how outsourcing deposition summary services can benefit your law firm:

• Enhanced efficiency – Legal professionals are often stretched thin. Outsourcing deposition summaries frees up valuable time for attorneys to focus on core tasks like case strategy, client communication, and trial preparation.

• Cost-effectiveness – Hiring and training dedicated staff for deposition summarization can be expensive. Outsourcing allows you to access a pool of experienced, qualified professionals and advanced technologies at potentially lower costs overall.

• Expertise and consistency – Legal service providers specializing in deposition summaries have highly experienced staff trained in legal research, writing, and analysis. They can deliver consistent, high-quality summaries that diffuse key points and opinions.

• Scalability – Outsourcing deposition summary services allows you to adapt services to your workload. During periods of high volume, you can leverage the resources of an external provider without incurring the cost of permanent staff additions. At times of lower volume, you can easily reduce scope.

• Technological advantages – Many deposition summary service providers utilize special software and technology for deposition analysis and summarization. These tools can improve efficiency and accuracy, compared to traditional methods. 

All of these benefits are maximized when using a deposition summary service that leverages generative AI technology to automate all parts of the process for greater efficiency at scale.

Utilizing AI for Deposition Summaries

The legal field is constantly evolving, and Gen AI is making its mark on various aspects of legal practice. One area where AI in law is gaining traction is with deposition summaries. AI  tools can analyze deposition transcripts, and identify key phrases, topics, and speaker sentiment.

Here are some ways AI can contribute to the deposition summary process:

• Automated transcript review – AI can streamline the initial document review process, highlighting potentially relevant sections. This can save time compared to manually sifting through the entire transcript, allowing attorneys to spend more time analyzing critical parts.

• Identifying key points – Within these AI-identified relevant sections, the same AI tools can be used to recognize key phrases and arguments, flagging them for human review. This can help to further narrow down the most important aspects of the testimony.

• Categorization and organization – AI can categorize information based on predefined topics or legal issues, making it easier to structure and organize the summary. This includes creating a top-level abstract allowing readers to parse it at a glance.

AI isn’t replacing human judgment and should be used with human oversight, but it can be a valuable tool for creating deposition summaries. It’s useful for increasing efficiency, improving accuracy, and minimizing costs by reducing the resources needed to create summaries. 

How Generative AI Works in a Legal Context

Understanding how gen AI can optimize deposition summary writing requires grasping how AI and LLMs work on a fundamental level. The underlying mechanic is a method of approximating human intelligence by mimicking the pattern-seeking processes that undergird human learning.

To that effect, models are trained on incomprehensibly large sets of data.

Texts, images, videos, and other inputs are fed into an AI model to teach it the way that human language and other patterns work. The model will be tasked with seemingly straightforward processes, like guessing what the next word in a given text document would be.

By accumulating enough knowledge, an AI tool is able to make educated guesses and generate new information or new syntheses thereof based not on what it knows but how it has learned.

As might be apparent, this is not an easy process. Models use immense amounts of computing power to digest the information they’re trained on. And the results are not always perfect; inaccuracies in the training process and imprecise prompting post-training can lead to strange outputs that seem plausible to the AI itself but are uncanny or obviously fake to the human eye.

Attention to detail in training and prompting minimizes these issues’ likelihood and impact.

Spotlight: U.S. Legal Support’s DepoSummary Pro™

U.S. Legal Support uses generative AI technologies to support attorneys’ deposition summary needs with our brand new DepoSummary Pro™ service. DepoSummary Pro™takes care of the heavy lifting by leveraging best-in-class AI technology to quickly review hundreds of pages of testimony to deliver a thorough and accurate deposition transcript summary, complete with multiple layers of summarization for ease of review. 

Our AI-powered deposition summary service allows attorneys to spend less time on manual review and more on strategic activities.

To learn more about how this works, or to see a live demonstration of DepoSummary Pro™ in action, check out our recent webinar on navigating the legal landscape with generative AI.

Quality Assurance and Review Processes

Creating a high-quality deposition summary requires accuracy and quality. After drafting the summary, it must be thoroughly reviewed for accuracy, clarity, and completeness. Having a legal professional review the summary can help you identify blind spots and areas for improvement.

When choosing an outsourced deposition summary service, find experts who take a meticulous approach. This allows you to be confident in the quality of your deposition summaries, and rest easy knowing that your summaries were reviewed with a fine-toothed comb. 

Deposition summaries start with effective deposition transcripts. If you’re in need of court reporting services, then U.S. Legal Support is here to help. Court reporting is in our DNA, and we provide a matchless combination of professional service, innovation, and scale. Plus, our gen AI powered services allow your team to focus its most valuable resources on the most critical strategic tasks.

Learn more about our litigation support services today.

Sources: 

1. Statista. Average time spent on other billable work per week. https://www.statista.com/statistics/869589/us-legal-services-time-spent-on-other-billable-work/
2. The Business Research Company. Legal Process Outsourcing Global Market Report. https://www.thebusinessresearchcompany.com/report/legal-process-outsourcing-global-market-report