Trial Magazine

When I first moved over to the plaintiff side, I worked for a terrific trial lawyer who assigned me to depose the safety representative for a large oil company. Our client had slipped on oil left on a jack-up rig walkway, resulting in a career-ending ruptured disk. I prepared for the deposition as thoroughly as I thought possible.

The morning of the depo, minutes before it was scheduled to begin in our conference room, my boss came into my office and asked me an unusual question: “Do you know what you’ve gotta get?” I paused at the wording but then answered the question I thought he was asking. “Oh, I know all the stuff I’m going to get!” I said, showing him my legal pad with pages of outline.

My boss chuckled and said, “You don’t have a clue. Come on, I’ll show you how to do it.” We went into the conference room, and my boss took over. He instructed the court reporter to swear in the witness, and the record read like this:

Q: Is your name John Doe?
A: Yes.
Q: Are you the head of safety for ABC Corp.?
A: Yes.
Q: Well, it’s not safe to have oil on the floor where people are working, is it?
A: No.
Q: Because you can foresee that someone might slip, right?
A: Yes.
Q: And that’s the way someone can have a career-ending injury, isn’t it?
A: Yes.

At that point, my boss declared, “We’re done!” We walked out of the room, and he told me, “You gotta know what you gotta get. And when you get it, you stop. Don’t take a seven-hour deposition when you need only five minutes for trial. I better never be up all night reading an hours-long deposition to find the few minutes I need.”

That advice made an impression. I took it to heart and practice. A few years later when I was out on my own, I had a chance to depose the CEO of a different major oil company. The case involved a business deal that had gone south. The company had agreed to sell two oil fields to my client but then backed away from the deal right before closing, claiming the fields had environmental problems. But less than 24 hours later, the company listed the fields for sale for four times the original price. The company had learned that my client was getting a great deal and thought it could make more money by breaching the agreement.

I went to depose the CEO in his conference room atop a skyscraper. He must have had 10 lawyers dressed in fine bespoke suits. The questioning went like this:

Q: Are you John Doe?
A: You know I am.
Q: Are you the CEO of company XYZ?
A: Yeah.
Q: Where’d you grow up?
A: New York, New York.
Q: Well, I grew up in Lubbock, Texas, and one of the things my parents taught me growing up was that my word is my bond. I have to do what I say. Did your parents teach you that in New York, New York?
A: No. What’s your point?
Q: My point is that your company broke its agreement with my client, and I’m trying to figure out if you have a few rotten apples at the company or if it’s rotten all the way to the top.
A: You listen to me. My company exists to make money. I instruct my people to make money. If my people can make more money walking away from an agreement, then they better walk from it or they won’t be working here any longer.
Q: OK, thank you.

I got up and walked out. And, ultimately, we won a very significant multimillion-dollar verdict.

The moral? Know what you’ve got to get, and don’t flirt with it. Be direct and get it! Now go slay some dragons!

W. Mark Lanier is the founding partner of the Lanier Law Firm in Houston and can be reached at wml@lanierlawfirm.com.