As I have time I'll post how my deposition went on Friday.
It was to start at noon 92+ miles from here, and Simpson assured me that we should be done well before 6 PM. We got done at maybe 5:45 PM.
The name of the game is to discredit the witness, I think. And I did trip up. I made a mistake in something I said. But I'll share about that later.
I was commanded to bring with me all emails, postings, and other communications with Glenn Dryden, Alex Walker, and Adam McReynolds. So I brought 1300+ postings, 150+ emails, and roughly 10 PM's. I also brought my subpoena of Dryden, and everything I got from Dunn Loring and Dryden in response to that subpoena, except for Tommy's piano concert video. You know, the black Young Chang 7' grand piano Tommy had picked out for the 3ABN set, which 3ABN sold around 1998 to Tommy for just $2,000.
I brought all these materials to the deposition on a CD. Simpson was expecting me to bring paper, but I wasn't told to do so. Under such circumstances I was required by the rules to bring this sort of electronically stored information in the same format it is normally stored in, or in a reasonably usable format. So the emails were in mbox format, the postings and PM's were in a MySQL dump, and the rest was in PDF or MP3.
But Simpson and Garvey weren't prepared for that.
Garvey had a laptop which could read the CD. He had the root directory opened, and at some point I had to find an email from June 5, 2007, which they wanted me to show them, the first contact we had from Alex. At that point they discovered that we needed an email program to read the file. What we ended up doing instead was opening the 28MB file in MS Notepad, and I searched for "You guys" in order to find the email they wanted.
So we were able to proceed in that fashion for a bit, but then Simpson asked me to find the next email after December 10, 2007. I told him there was no way. I would have to check every date header for every email in that file before determining which email was the next one. An email program could do it instantly, but trying to do it manually like that in Notepad just wouldn't work.
I think that was when Simpson decided to take a look at the file to see what he could do, and I ran out to the car to move it a second time. It was in a two-hour parking zone, and it was way past time for lunch anyway, so I brought my lunch back in. I had thought that maybe I would get a chance to eat when I first arrived, while they were looking through the 1500 or so documents, but that wasn't how things worked. (If I had produced the documents on paper, how long would it have taken them to read all those?)
Coming back in I handed Simpson the present I had brought: a rather large cucumber from the garden, something to remember me by. It brought some smiles, which was a good thing, since really this deposition didn't go very well for 3ABN et. al. from what I could tell.
We gave up, I think, at that point trying to manually find emails in Notepad, and proceeded to something else.