Steve: My name is Steve Babitsky. I’m the president of SEAK Incorporated, the expert witness training company. I’m here today with my partner, Attorney James Mangraviti, to discuss our two-day interactive training seminar, “How To Excel At Your Expert Witness Deposition.” Jim, who should attend “How To Excel At Your Expert Witness Deposition?”

James: Any expert witness, Steve, that wants to do better at deposition. And this is really important because as an expert witness, typically you’re going to testify at deposition much more often than you are going to testify at trial. And we’re really going to drill down and focus solely on depositions in this course.

Steve: What types of specialties and disciplines is this course appropriate for?

James: All of them, really. We are going to go from anywhere from accountants to urologists that we’re going to have in our class and everything in between. The techniques that we teach are universal and are applicable to all specialties and disciplines.

Steve: And Jim, what do experts learn in this course?

James: They learn a lot. Mainly what we’re going to teach them is how to markedly improve their performance at deposition to make them more comfortable, to make them more effective and to make them more valuable.

Steve: What teaching methodologies do you use to make this course interesting, effective and even memorable?

James: Yeah. We really try to make it fun. So we use four things. Number one, we’re going to give you a lecture and you’re going to get a very, very highly detailed and very easy to use and understand course book. And we’re going to go through the entire book in this course. Number two, we’re going to answer your questions. And we like answering questions as much as we can within the limits of time so that we can customize the course to your particular needs. Number three, we’re going to show tons, I think we show maybe over a 100 sample deposition clips of experts testifying in real cases, and we can critique those. “This is what the expert’s doing well. This is what the expert’s not doing well.” And then finally and most memorably, we do a ton of mock deposition exercises in this class. We get everybody involved and everybody that takes this class is going to have an opportunity to practice their deposition skills and get critique. It’s very effective. It’s very memorable. And it moves along.

Steve: And how do you personalize this training journey?

James: Remember those deposition examples that I was talking about? The way that we base those is in advance we write to each of the attendees and we ask them for both a C.V. and a redacted expert witness report, if they have it, and also a list of the most difficult deposition questions that they’ve had in the past. We take that information. We also do independent research on the experts. We take all that information and then we use that as the basis for some of our mock deposition examples. And we find it very effective, very memorable, very meaty.

Steve: So are continuing education credits available to attendees?

James: Absolutely. We have a lot of credits available. Give us a call or visit our website and we can give you the list of credits that are available.

Steve: How does an expert witness find out about the upcoming courses that SEAK offers?

James: You can find our current list of expert witness training here. We hope to see you there.