Will You Have to Testify?
SUMMARY
Learn about the different ways you would testify in a personal injury case such as a deposition, and why it's important. I'll also cover what happens at a deposition and how you can prepare for it.
Depositions play a critical role in the personal injury process. They can help to determine the strength of your case and to reach a settlement agreement so you don't have to go to trial.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Whether you testify at trial is a very different question than whether you will have to testify at a deposition. You'll have to give deposition testimony if you want a resolution to your case, because the defendants want to make sure that what you're saying is true. They want to understand your side of the story. They want to understand your perspective of what happened. And the best way for them to do that is to have you sit before them and to answer questions under oath.
People just generally tell the truth when they answer questions under the penalty of perjury. And so you will have to give deposition testimony because that's what an insurance company or some defendant would require you to do in order for them to evaluate your case, in order for them to make an offer to resolve your case. They're going to want to have a deposition. If it's a case where you've been injured, not only will they want you to have a deposition, but they will also want you to go through what we call as a defendant's medical exam, where a doctor that is hired by them gets to evaluate you based on the injury that you're claiming in your particular lawsuit. So a defendant will require your deposition, and they will require a medical exam.
They'll want you to make sure that you are examined by their doctor so their doctor can confirm that you, in fact, are injured and that the injury likely came from the negligence or recklessness of a particular defendant. Once your deposition has been taken, once you've been examined by a medical doctor, and once you have completed being treated by your own doctors, then we get to the point where we have experts that are going to have their depositions taken and the experts generally, in a case, in a personal injury case, those experts are your medical doctors. The doctors that have treated you, the doctors that know you the best, the doctors that are familiar with your circumstances, the doctors that are familiar with your injury. Once those doctors have had their depositions taken, then your lawyer will take the depositions of the defendant's experts, because they're going to have a whole host of experts that are going to try to say that you're not hurt. As bad as you say you're hurt or you shouldn't have, or you didn't need to be out of work for as long as you were.
And so there's going to be a back and forth where we're deposing their people, they're deposing your people. And ultimately, when we get to the point where everybody has been deposed, there is the looming trial date. And as we get closer and closer to the trial date, that's when things get a lot busier and there's a lot more work to be done because the courts require a lot of documents to be filed, a lot of documents to be exchanged with the other side. There's a lot of discussion between the sides because we still want to see whether or not this can be resolved before going to trial. Trials are very taxing.
Trials are very expensive. And as your lawyer, I'm more than happy to go to trial. But if I can resolve the case before having to expend all of the money that are necessary to put on a trial, I'm more inclined to do that simply because that could potentially be more money that goes into your pocket, as opposed to the pockets of really, really expensive experts that have to close down their businesses to attend a trial. So that's just an incentive for your lawyer to be someone that is willing to talk to the other side to see whether or not the case can be resolved before an actual trial date.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Many personal injury lawyers, including myself, will give a free initial consultation so you can determine if I am someone you feel comfortable sharing sensitive information with, and working with for at least several months to as long as a few years.