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Your client walks into the examination room already convinced that the more they say, the more they help. By the end of the morning, opposing counsel has three admissions the client never needed to make, all because nobody taught them the single most useful skill in the room: how to stop talking. The prep meeting is where you fix that, and it works better as a rehearsal than a lecture.
Why the Meeting Before the Meeting Matters
Discovery is not a conversation. It feels like one, which is exactly the trap. Opposing counsel is friendly, the pace is unhurried, and your client, who is anxious and eager to prove they are honest and cooperative, fills every silence with more than the question asked for. That instinct is human. It is also how admissions get made that did not need to be made.
The pre-discovery meeting exists to replace that instinct with a habit. You are not coaching your client to hide anything. You are teaching them to answer the question in front of them, accurately, and then wait. A client who has practised this once in your office behaves completely differently from a client who has only heard you describe it.
Book real time for this. If your file chronology is tidy and your disclosure is squared away, you can spend the meeting on the thing that actually decides the day, which is how your client performs under questioning.
Note. Schedule the prep meeting a few days before the examination, not the night before. Your client needs a night of sleep between the practice and the real thing, and you may need time to chase a document the rehearsal shakes loose.
Three Rules Every Client Should Memorize
Give your client three rules and make them repeat the rules back to you. Not five, not ten. Three, because three is what a nervous person can actually hold onto at nine in the morning across a table from a stranger.
- Listen to the whole question. Not the first half, not the version they assume is coming. The actual question, all the way to the period.
- Pause before answering. A short silence gives them room to think and gives you room to object if you need to.
- Answer only what is asked. If the question can be answered yes, answer yes. Do not explain, justify, or volunteer the backstory unless the question calls for it.
These three carry most of the weight. Everything else in the meeting is really just a way of drilling them until they hold up under pressure.
The client who answers the question and stops is worth more than the client who tells the whole truth badly. Every litigator, eventually
Practising the Awkward Silence
This is the part most prep meetings skip, and it is the part that changes outcomes. Your client will not naturally pause. They will not naturally stop after answering. You have to build the muscle, and you build it by running mock questions where you deliberately leave the silence hanging after their answer.
Ask a simple question. Let them answer. Then say nothing. Count to five in your head. Most clients, unable to bear the quiet, will start talking again, and that second sentence is usually the one that hurts. Point it out gently the first time it happens. Do it a few more times and they start to feel the pull of the silence and resist it. That resistance is the whole skill.
Tip. Tell your client that silence is opposing counsel's tool, not theirs. An examiner who stops writing and just looks at your client is fishing. The correct response to a finished answer is a closed mouth and a calm face.
Warn them, too, about the friendly tangent. A skilled examiner will chat, seem to lose the thread, and let the client wander somewhere useful. Practise a client who stays on the question no matter how casual the room feels. The same discipline pays off later if the matter reaches cross-examination, where the stakes and the pressure are higher still.
Handling Documents and Refreshed Memory
Documents trip up clients in two directions. Some guess at what a document says rather than admitting they need to see it. Others treat every document as an ambush and freeze. Teach a middle path.
If your client is asked about a document, they are entitled to see it. Tell them to ask for it, read it, and only then answer. If they do not recall something without seeing the record, "I would need to see the document" is a complete and proper answer. It is not a dodge. It is accuracy.
| Situation | What a prepared client does |
|---|---|
| Asked about a document not in front of them | Asks to see it before answering |
| Asked to interpret a document | States what it says, not what they assume it means |
| Memory is genuinely refreshed by the record | Answers from the document, and says so |
| Handed something they have never seen | Says so plainly and reads it fully before responding |
Keeping the underlying records clean makes all of this easier. When your production is well organized, and any promises to produce are tracked so nothing slips, the examination flows and your client is not caught flat. Tools that keep matter documents and undertakings in one place, whether that is A1 CMS or a system you already trust, take a real source of chaos off the table. If you want the mechanics of tracking those promises, see our note on undertakings.
What to Do When the Client Does Not Know
The hardest thing to teach an honest, anxious client is that "I do not know" and "I do not remember" are correct, complete, and often the best possible answers. Clients hear those phrases as failure. They think not knowing makes them look evasive or unprepared, so they guess, and a guess under oath is a gift to the other side.
Draw the line clearly. Guessing is wrong. Estimating, when the question asks for an estimate and the client can honestly give one, is fine, as long as they flag it as an estimate. "About two weeks, but I am not certain" is defensible. A confident wrong number invented to fill a silence is not.
A truthful "I do not remember" cannot be impeached later. A confident guess that turns out wrong can, and will, follow your client all the way to trial.
Run a few questions in the mock session that your client genuinely cannot answer, and reward the honest "I do not know." Praise it out loud so they feel it is safe. You are rewiring a reflex, and reflexes only change with repetition and a little reassurance.
None of this is about making your client sound rehearsed. It is about giving an honest person the composure to be honest efficiently, which is harder than it sounds under examination. Run the rehearsal, drill the three rules, sit in the silence with them until it stops feeling unbearable, and send them home to sleep on it. For more on getting clients ready across the life of a file, browse the Family and Civil Practice hub or the rest of my posts. The work you put in the day before discovery is almost always the cheapest work in the whole file.
