Provides descriptions and illustrations of effective strategies and techniques for taking and defending depositions. Designed to serve as a text for a 2-4 unit stand-alone depositions course or as a supplement to a civil pre-trial lawyering course. Devotes separate chapters to such fundamental skills as obtaining helpful answers to critical questions, undercutting harmful testimony, obtaining a deponent's version of significant events, and obtaining information from evasive deponents. Other chapters include topics such as responding to inconsistent or implausible testimony, overcoming opposing counsel's objections and obstructionist tactics, and preparing a client to be deposed.

Explains how to prepare a case for trial by identifying historical factual propositions that satisfy applicable legal elements; identifying evidence and inferences tending to prove or disprove the crucial factual propositions in a case; organizing evidence into persuasive arguments, whether the evidence is disputed or undisputed or suggests an implausibility in a witness' story; and understanding the influence of "silent arguments" and taking advantage of or countering such arguments. Illustrates interrelationship among evidence, argument, and technique. Sets forth and illustrates trial techniques so advocates can persuasively communicate their arguments to judges and jurors.

I will begin this book by analyzing the historical and political context for the emergence of managed competition (chapter 1). The chapters that follow will list the corporate initiatives that were launched during the 1970s (chapter 2); describe the evolutionary changes and expansions they went through during the 1980s and early 1990s in the process of becoming "managed competition" (chapter 3); describe the ways in which managed care systems attempt to regulate the cost of health care services and discuss why they fail to do so (chapter 4); describe managed care attempts to control the quality of services and discuss why they fail to do so (chapter 5); and conclude with a summary of the book's major points as well as descriptions of some alternative approaches to getting our nation's health care needs met (chapter 6).