TO-WIT: APOPHIS RISING
Have you ever, at the conclusion of a deposition, pushed yourself back from the conference table, clasped your hands behind your neck, smiled confidently and congratulated yourself on how well it went? Yeah, me neither.
With depositions you just never know. I’ve done maybe five hundred in my career, each unique but each with common threads of both certainty and suspense intertwined; a certainty that all deponents comes to the deposition garbed in truth, and a suspense as to exactly when during its course they will begin to disrobe.
Depositions are kind of like asteroids. They tear around helter skelter with their own trajectories, harmless enough until they careen unexpectedly off course and plummet down to Earth with frequently devastating results. And sooner or later they always careen off course.
I recently took the deposition of a witness critical to a client’s case. Because of the significance of her testimony, I had interviewed her no less than three times before her deposition, the last time being the night before. She knew things, important things, things that no one else knew. Her testimony was of titanic importance to my client’s case, and she was willing to talk.
Come the start of her deposition she was still willing to talk. She just wasn’t willing to say the same things. I realized her testimony was going to be a fairy tale when she answered my first question with “Once upon a time…” I might not have been right about what she was going to say but I was right that it would be titanic. When she was through my client was sunk.
When I walked into my office next morning, both my secretary and my associate knew at once something was amiss. I’m guessing they could tell because of the “Say One Word To Me And I’ll Kill You” button I’d pinned to my earlobe.
I can deal with defeat okay as long as I can see it coming. I can see it in the way a jury refuses to look at me when they file back in with an adverse verdict, and I can see it in the way my court reporter friend hangs himself with an imaginary noose and laughs at me when the judge walks out of the courtroom on recess.
I didn’t see this one coming, it had caught me quite unexpectedly in the solar plexus. I sat there in my chair all morning, numb and befuddled, knowing that without this witness’s testimony I would have to withdraw the case. After a satisfying mope, I instructed my secretary to get opposing counsel on the phone.
“I know when I’m licked,” he said before I could utter a word. “If your demand is still the same, we’re settled.”
“You’re kidding,” I said before my best avaricious instincts had kicked in.
“Okay, five grand more, but that’s it.”
“Send me the release,” I said, “we have a deal. You made a smart decision.” God will get me for that last one.
I wish I could tell you I knew what happened. I wish I could tell you I snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, but I can’t do that either. Last time I saw those jaws they had a death grip on my posterior. All I can do is accept the mystery, like when a beautiful woman smiles at me. I can’t fathom why it happens, but occasionally it does.
Oh now, don’t get me wrong, I’ll take the credit, however undeserved. I was, after all, right about one thing. With depositions, you just never know.
© 2011, S. Sponte, Esq.