Good Idea:  Serving duty as a juror—as required!  We have discussed this: Jury Duty: Served! and Jury Duty: Reprised. 

Bad Idea: Ignoring the Judge’s instructions while serving.  Yep, discussed this too: Juror Twittering Did Not Affect Jury Verdict and Tech Interference with Juries.

Even Worse: Asking the Defendant Doctor for medical advice—during the trial!    

The Davidson County Juvenile Court—still completely displaced from its building by massive flooding early this month—had some good luck shine its way this week.  The clean-up efforts revealed $32,000 in cash in a safe in the clerk’s office—soggy and smelly, perhaps, but present and accounted for!  Assuming the cash can be treated, this is some welcome news.  Check out the article.

By Eileen Burkhalter Smith 

I regularly tell my witnesses that “reading and signing” a deposition is waived by fact and expert witnesses alike.  I recently experienced, however, an opposing expert who wanted to read and sign.  We did not complete the expert’s deposition in one day (okay under Tennessee State Rules, though it might not have been under FRCP 30(d)(1)) and the “second-half” of the deposition was scheduled weeks away.

On the date of the second deposition, the expert handed me a single-spaced typed page of all the changes he wanted to make to the deposition.  Presumably, his own hand-made “Errata” sheet.  The problem?  Some of his changes were actual changes of testimony (e.g., change “yes” to “no”), and supplementation of responses which clearly required him to review documents after the testimony (e.g., change “I don’t know” to “January 17, 1996.”)

I believe my exact response on the record was “Are you kidding me?”  And I have revisited this debacle over and over in my mind.  There are a number of things that went wrong, of course.  Here are just a few of them: