The Mindset to Dominate your Discovery

I want to talk about something that makes most of my clients visibly uncomfortable the moment I bring it up: the Examination for Discovery.

And I get it. The idea of sitting in a room while a lawyer fires questions at you sounds like something out of a courtroom drama — tense, adversarial, and one wrong word away from disaster. Most people walk into preparation with their stomach in knots, terrified of saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, somehow torpedoing their own case with their own mouth.

That fear is understandable. It's also the wrong mindset.

Here's what an examination for discovery actually is. Under the Supreme Court Family Rules, it's a formal process that gives the opposing party the opportunity to ask you questions. The examiners goals are to understand the facts as you see them, to explore what they don't know, and to pin down what they already suspect. Both parties are usually present, along with their lawyers and a court reporter whose job is to transcribe every question and every answer as they happen. That's it. That's the process.

The fear people bring to it usually comes from treating it like a trap. Like the other lawyer is a predator and you're the prey, and the moment you open your mouth you're going to say something catastrophic. Like anything less than perfection is fatal. When I see a client in that headspace, I stop them. Because if you approach discovery trying not to lose, you will not perform well.

What I ask my clients to do instead is to commit to a single goal: be a helpful, credible source of information.

Helpful means you're actually trying to answer the question being asked. Not the question you wish were being asked. Not the question you're afraid is being asked underneath the question being asked. The question that was asked.

Credible means your answers are internally consistent and logical. You're not contradicting yourself, you're not embellishing, you're not guessing when you don't know. Credibility isn't about being impressive; credibility is about being trusted when you answer.

Source of information means that you provide what you know. All of it. If you know something that's responsive to a question, you say it. You are not there to hide. You are there to be known.

There's also something practical about discovery that most people don't appreciate until I explain it to them: nobody watching you is in the room when that transcript gets read. Only the transcript exists.

Think about that for a moment.

If a lawyer asks "What is your name?" and you take two minutes of confused silence before answering "Darnell" — the transcript reads "What is your name? Darnell." That's it. No "witness appeared flustered." No "the witness took an unnervingly long time to recall basic personal information." Just a question and an answer. The court reporter is capturing a record, not a performance.

This is not an invitation to game the process by stalling. Stalling is inconsistent with the directive to be helpful. But it is a reminder that discovery is not a performance you can win or lose in the room. It is a record. And the best thing you can do for that record is to slow down, understand the question, and answer it honestly and completely.

I have a system of 4 rules that help guide clients through the process. Before the discovery we go through the process, we talk about the rules, we practice how to answer questions and we work to build the right mindset before starting the discovery. Because the goal is never to survive discovery. The goal is to be a helpful, credible, source of information.