War Stories: Asking Better Questions Takes Listening to the Answers

And we started to make some real inroads and get much better testimony and obviously she didn't like it I mean the more that you kind of push past people's BS answers and they start to get a little combative back I had to come out of a big firm and at big firms when you're a young lawyer you don't get a whole lot of experience taking depositions and things like that because the partners always do that sort of thing I had taken a couple but I hadn't really gotten into it a whole lot so once I went out on my own practice I started to take more depositions and so we had this case where it was a son who was fighting against his mom's executor the mom had died the executor had sold the property that she shouldn't have sold and she was supposed to give it to the son and she didn't and because of that there was some some harm you know it wasn't a whole lot of money but there was this you know few tens of thousands of dollars that we were going after one of the things we had to do is go after the executor his attorney and take her deposition because the attorney was the one that told the executor to sell the property rather than give it out to my client which is what Sol was supposed to have happened so I went to the deposition of this attorney and it's not unusual but she was very defensive very competitive we're obviously coming in and were questioning the advice that she gave so she's worried about malpractice if we win our case it's possible that the executor would have turned around in Souter for malpractice so she's very defensive about everything she did and we kind of had or we had her in a good case in the sense that the property shouldn't have been sold and it was so it's fairly black and white so I go into the deposition and just asking the questions off of my outline and when I was a younger attorney I would actually do an outline and I would actually write out each question which you know nowadays sounds funny to me but that's what I would do and I would read each question and as a young attorney you don't you're not so good at listening to the answers and so your whole goal is to get to the next question and sometimes you don't really hear the answers that are coming and that's unfortunate because there can be some good stuff in those answers but I was going along and it dawned on me that every time I asked her a question about well how did you do this or how did you do that she would say well my preference is to do it this way and she said that a number of times and it finally dawned on me that well that's not really answering the question if I asked you what did you do specifically in this case and you say well my preference is to do it this way you're dodging the question because you're not telling you what you actually did right here in this case and so once I caught on to the way she was answering then I started to push back on her and I'm like well I understand that that's your preference so you your preference is to do things the right way but what did you actually do in this case oh I did it the wrong way so you know my preference is to advise executives not to sell property if that's what the will says okay that might be your preference but in this case what did you actually do and so then I was able to start pushing back on her and we started to make some real inroads and get much better testimony and obviously she didn't like it I mean the more that you kind of pushed past people's BS answers they start to get a little combative back but there's really nothing she could do about it because the point is is that ayat was entitled to know exactly what you did right here in this case and I'm not asking you about your preferences I'm asking about what you actually did and that was a really important lesson as a young attorney to to learn to listen to the answers. [Music]