So… following up on yesterday’s post, I was deposed today for my expert witness gig. I was told it would probably take two hours or so. Five hours later, and I was finally done.
First up were the biography questions. Who the hell am I to think I can make these opinions? Where do I get off acting like a know it all? Those kind of questions. It was funny. At one point they entered my Linked In profile as an exhibit. If you’ve seen it (and yes I am not linking to it on purpose – gotta keep public and private somewhat separate , yknow?). Well my Linked In profile, has some humorous entries in it. Case in point: areas of specialty. Now is it my fault that I am an expert at “kicking ass and taking names”? When that was read into the record, the court reporter had to stifle a laugh 
I calmly explained that I use Linked In begrudgingly to keep in touch with old coworkers and not to market myself.
So, after an hour of getting my ego bruised, and you all know how fragile my ego is, we moved on to a series of questions regarding my knowledge of the case outside of my forensics report. The whole gameplan up to this point was for me to do a “clean room” analysis of the code – no knowledge of the business and legal wrangling that had occurred. It was hoped that by doing this, my analysis would have that much more weight as a true neutral party. Opposing council was flummoxed. They had obviously fed their expert the conclusions they wanted and he couldnt believe that I was answering “I have no idea” to all of his questions.
Next, we moved on to my report. Very interesting. As it turned out, he didn’t directly question any of my conclusions. Instead, he tried to play games with timing and dates. I thought I handled myself fairly well. At any rate, I never shouted out “Don’t be an idiot”, which is more than I can say for my last three bosses.
Finally, we came to the opposing expert witness report. I spent about 45 minutes, tearing it to shreds, without giving them too much ammo.
Phew – 5 hours is a long time to be recorded with every word you say written down.
When we left, our council said I did good job – blah blah blah. On the other hand, he did ask if I could be available when we depose their expert witness. He said they could really use my insight to help direct questioning. Another 5 billable hours? Hell yeah! I might just be good at this.
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