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Make the most of company-employee depositions: to get the best results from this routine part of discovery in products cases, ask questions that are anything but routine.

Article Excerpt
On September 6, 2000, Connie Peters started her 1993 Oldsmobile Cutlass in her driveway, just as she had every morning in the seven years since she had bought the car. What happened immediately after that changed the lives of the Peters family forever.

Connie was alone in the car, and there were no witnesses, but the events of that morning are undisputed. The Cutlass accelerated in reverse down the driveway, across the street, and through a neighbor's yard before striking a tree more than 120 feet from where it started. The car hit the tree with such force that Peters's left arm was severed above the elbow and her skull was fractured in several places.

After striking the tree, the car continued moving backward, turning back in the direction of Peters's home. It traveled again through the neighbor's yard, across the street, up an incline, and into a one-foot-high landscaped area before stopping nearly 100 feet from the tree.

Peters's husband, who heard the noise of the collision from inside the house, ran outside and found his wife at the wheel. She has been in a persistent vegetative state since the accident.

When my firm was hired to represent the Peters family, my colleagues and I realized our first job was to find out what made the car behave as it did. It had no history of mechanical problems, and there were no observable defects in the accelerator, cruise control, or throttle. Soon, only two possible explanations remained: Either Peters had depressed the accelerator, or the cruise control had suddenly engaged on its own.

The automotive industry's standard response in cases like this is that all sudden-acceleration accidents are caused by driver error. But two years of discovery produced overwhelming evidence that the cruise-control theory was the right one.

During a two-week trial we introduced this evidence, which consisted of the accident facts (as analyzed by accident reconstructionists for both sides) ; evidence of other similar incidents, including 200 customer complaints of sudden acceleration; company documents; and testimony from General Motors (GM) engineers. The cumulative weight of this evidence proved that sudden-acceleration events can occur as a result of inadvertent activation of the...

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