The Legal Pad Lady

May 1987

I represented a plaintiff at her examination before trial.  She was questioned by a nervous, inexperienced female attorney.

I knew I was in trouble when she set herself up across the table from us with no fewer than 5 different legal pads.  The questioning was tedious, as it always is.  A discovery deposition is different than trial testimony in several ways.  Rather than try to focus on the main point of the case, it is an opportunity to ask a wide range of questions in a search for information that might be helpful to your side later on.  There is no jury to be disgusted by the personal or offensive nature of a question.  There is no Judge present to rule on objections, so you either allow the witness to answer or face the possibility that your objection will be overruled at a later date and your client required to reappear to answer questions not previously answered.

I think some lawyers conduct these depositions as if they live in dread of being criticized for leaving a particular question unasked, and so they keep going until they have simply exhausted their imagination and cannot think of another question to ask.

This attorney could not ask a question without referring to one of her legal pads.  All of her questions were written out, but she was constantly switching from one pad to another.  She would then flip the pages of the pad looking for questions she did not remember asking.

Towards the end of the day I began to become extremely upset and impatient.  I began to behave badly.  When there were pauses of several minutes between questions, I started threatening to terminate the deposition unless she asked another question.  I repeatedly asked her during the pauses if she had any further questions.

What had been an ordeal for my client and I had now become an ordeal for her.  By the end of the deposition, she had to take a break because she had begun to weep.  I was not sympathetic. 

Flashback:  April 1982

The first time I met the girl I married was when she showed up as a freelance court reporter sent to take the testimony of a witness I was questioning in Brooklyn. 

The deposition went a little late.  She happened to mention (and I believed I detected a note of annoyance in her voice) that she had missed her train to Eastern Long Island.  I offered her a lift.  She replied (in what I interpreted as an unnecessarily scornful way) that I could not give her a lift because it was too far out of my way.  I told her I didn’t mind.  She refused again.  The defense lawyer razzed me in a juvenile, locker room way about being rejected unceremoniously.  His exact words may have been "Oh!  Snagged".

December 1987

I threw a surprise party for my wife on the occasion of her 30^th birthday.  She was very surprised when we walked into the house and it was filled with our friends yelling "Happy Birthday!" at her.  But by far the bigger surprise was that I had successfully planned and executed a party without help and successfully kept a secret.

The following week she was at an office in Manhattan to work on a case with a woman attorney she had become friendly with.  While they were waiting for the other attorneys to show up she began showing her pictures which had been taken at the party. 

At that moment, one of the defense attorneys – a woman – entered the room.  “Pictures!”  she exclaimed.  “I love pictures.  Can I see”? 

After looking at a couple of pictures, she came to one of my wife and I seated together on my recliner.  “Is that your husband”?   She gasped.  “I hate him!”

“Well I don’t” said my wife indignantly.

She told me the story when she got home.  It had been the legal pad lady.