In your family law case, you may have a deposition of your co-parent coming up. You know that's going to cost a lot of money. You don't want to waste any money. You've spent enough already. You want to make sure you're getting the bang for your buck. I'm Ron Gore, co-founder of Co-Parent Academy. I'm a family law attorney. Today we're going to talk about how to help prepare your attorney to depose your co-parent. The first step is to make sure that you've revealed everything to your attorney. They are trained at issue spotting. They've done it their whole careers. You are not as trained at it. Things may seem important to you that aren't really important in the big scheme of things for the court. Things may seem inconsequential to you that are hugely important to the court. Giving your attorney all of the information allows them to do the issue spotting that connects the facts with the law and connect with your judge's personality, how they interpret and apply the law. Critical to reveal everything. Once you've revealed everything, you and your attorney will talk about identifying what the issues are. What are the things that the court could decide if you and your co-parent can't decide? Those are the issues to be litigated. For each issue to be litigated, you and your attorney will come up with what your goal is. Your goal cannot just be some pie in the sky statement of I'm going to have sole custody, I'm going to make all the decisions, they're going to do everything I say. Hopefully that's not your personality. That's most likely not what the court is going to do in really any case, except for the absolute worst cases. And so identifying realistic goals for each issue to be litigated and where to reach agreements to try to reduce the expense of the deposition in the first place is a key part of preparing for your co-parents' deposition. Now that you've identified what the issues are and what your attorney is going to be focusing on in the deposition, it's time to go back to all of that information that you have. Remember that even if your attorney really cares about your case, and hopefully they do, they've got a ton of other facts in their head. They have tons of other families that they're currently working with, that they've worked with in the past, and they're trying to separate your facts from theirs, and it gets difficult. I mean, it's honestly a difficult task to do. And so providing your attorney, again, even if you've already given it, information that will be helpful for your attorney to depose your co-parent is really a good investment by you. The less time your attorney has to spend preparing for the deposition because you've provided them everything in a very organized manner, the more it's going to save you money and the better outcome you're going to get at the actual deposition. There's lots of ways to provide your attorney with the information that they need in the documents that they need. I'm a big fan of organizing things by thinking about a day in the life. You know, when your child is with you, what do they do from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to bed? What do you need to do to help get them through their day? What are all of the points of contacts they have? Who are the people that they see? If you think about it that way, and if you spread it out over a sufficient period of time, you're going to be able to give your attorney a very detailed look into your child's life and all of the aspects of it that will be relevant to the issues to be litigated. So you think about things like on a school day, compare that to a weekend, compare that to holidays. Go through the holidays, which ones are important to you, which ones are not? Does your child have any special needs? Do they have an IEP or a 504 plan? Do they have any medical needs that require consistent upkeep? Like, are they diabetic? Do they have anything that the average parent doesn't have to think about? Is there anything that you're concerned your co-parent isn't thinking about? Going through in the day of the life for your child is a great way to organize everything, to make sure that you're getting all of the information and documents that your attorney will need. Once you go through that process of thinking about your child's life in that way and your interactions with it and your co-parents, now you can go back and you can get documents that are related to all of those things. You know, if your child has an IEP, get a copy of the IEP in there. If they have special medical needs, get their medical records. Anything that is of interest that you've identified with your attorney as an issue to be litigated, you need to provide that information and documentation. Now I think it's really helpful to use Dropbox, for example, to provide your attorney with a well-organized folder structure of all of the information that they're going to need. If you've identified issues to be litigated, you can organize it in relation to those issues to be litigated. If you have a folder with subfolders with lots of documents, I think it's a best practice to have a README sheet in each of the folders that says this is what's in this folder. That way, at a glance, the attorney can look through, can see what you intended to provide, to compare it to what you actually provided, and it can help your attorney quickly organize the documents that may be needed as exhibits at a deposition. If you feel like your attorney is forgetting things that you've told them, it's understandable that you're going to be frustrated. But I would recommend, in addition to maybe saying, hey, I feel like you're forgetting some things, provide them with what they need. Your job as the client is to get the best outcome for your child and for yourself. If you have to tell your attorney things a couple times, if you have to provide an extra sheet of paper to make sure that your attorney is organized and on track, then I would do it just because I think it's probably simplest. One thing that an attorney really hates is being surprised in the moment. It's a fear of attorneys to be in the middle of questioning somebody under oath and get something that comes completely out of left field that is a complete non sequitur to everything else that they've been thinking about. They get this cognitive dissonance. And if you don't have a lot of experience, if you're not really quick on your feet, then it can be a little bit difficult to recover and to deal with that information in a way that's helpful for your client. So as you're talking with your attorney about all of this information, remember to be sure to bring up all the things that are negative for you. If you've got text messages where you're just being a complete asshole, you need to make sure that you highlight those for your attorney so that they're prepared to deal with them. And if there may be a reason why you communicated in that way, it doesn't justify it, but the reason, the rationale may help your attorney ask some helpful follow-up questions that can maybe make the most of a bad situation. So be sure that you're providing your attorney not just the stuff that's useful from your perspective to show that you know your co-parent has issues, make sure you're showing the things that are negatives for you as well. As you're pointing out these negatives to your attorney, both theirs and yours, it's important that these negatives have some sort of nexus, some sort of connection to your children. If your co-parent has some sort of nasty habit that you think is disgusting, or if you think they just have something that you think is stupid that they do, but it has no connection to the kids whatsoever, does not impact their lives whatsoever, then you're not going to be able to make much hay out of it. During the deposition, it's really important that you are professional. One thing I like to do is to have a shared Google document during my depositions. If it's a really document-heavy, uh really dense set of facts, I'll often have my paralegal with me and will be on a shared Google document so that she can help point me to important pieces of information that maybe I'm not hitting at the moment. There may be an exhibit that is related that I'm not thinking of in the moment because I'm thinking about asking the questions. So having that shared Google document with my paralegal and me is really helpful because she can keep me on track and she can suggest things that I need to be following up on. But also to have a shared Google document with the client can be really helpful. What I do is I type in one color in the Google document. I'm a very quick typist, and so I typically am typing what I'm asking and what they're answering as we're talking. Not every person will do it that way. And then my peer legal will have a different color and she can intersperse comments or questions into the outline that I'm typing out, and then the client will have a different color as well that they can put in there. And by putting all that together, it's easy for me at a glance to see what is going on, if I'm missing something, something that needs to be followed up on. And it can be quite revelatory in the moment and can really increase the quality of the deposition if you have that kind of system in place. As you're sitting there watching your co-parent be deposed, I'm sure you're gonna be feeling lots of emotions, a range of emotions that's really hard to understand if you're not the person who's sitting there in that position. What you absolutely have to do is be professional. You can't be glaring at your co-parent, you can't be laughing, you can't be giving little looks that you know is gonna set them off. And if they're giving you similar looks, just ignore it. Right? This is a time for you to be stone faced, participating in good faith, being extremely professional, assisting your attorney, assist you. And if you start to cause a ruckus in the deposition, then that's gonna get in the transcript. If the other attorney is good at all, they're going to raise the issue of what's occurring, and it'll be in the deposition transcript. It won't be testimony, but it'll be in there, and it's something that will be documented for later. So be cautious, be careful, be respectful, be professional. Don't do anything to taint the value of what your attorney is attempting to create for you in the deposition. It's really difficult to overstate the value of a deposition in a family law case when there are serious issues to be litigated. The more that you can assist your attorney in preparing for the deposition in advance by being organized and complete in the information that you provide, and the more that you can assist your attorney in the moment by paying attention to the deposition, by maintaining your professional demeanor, by communicating with your attorney about issues that need to be followed up on, you're going to be able to assist your children by assisting your attorney and having a deposition that is fruitful, that provides information that will assist the court in learning the truth about what is in your children's best interest, which is the goal of the deposition in the first place. If you've found this conversation to be helpful, informative for you, then I ask that you please like, subscribe, share all those things to help other people see this information as well. If you have had a family law deposition and if you have an experience that you would like to share, we'd love to hear it. Please let us know in the comments what was your experience? Was it good? Was it bad? Did you find the deposition to be helpful in your case? Was it not helpful? Anything that you want to share would be amazing. Please do make sure to anonymize the information. You don't want to put names and all of that in there. That's not going to really be helpful for folks. And it may only cause difficulty for you. But thank you so much for listening. I hope you have a fantastic day. Take care.