The Ropa-Dope
Going back to the time between 1977 and 1990, I was a daily commuter into Manhattan from Long Island. I realize that it sounds totally crazy (something I failed to comprehend at the time), but I would get up at 4am every weekday morning and catch the 5:14am train from Rockville Centre into Penn Station. I would then share a cab (always with the same two other guys who I know only from the morning cab line) up to my office at Park and 49th Street, landing at my desk at about 6am. I would then work and rarely leave the building for twelve hours and catch one of several evening trains home. Getting a cab on Park Avenue at 6pm was much harder, so I would usually go via two subways to get back to Penn Station and then ride the 36 scheduled minutes on the train back to Rockville Centre, where I would walk to my car and drive the two miles home. I would generally get home by 7:30pm, and that was my work day. I used to survive on about five hours of sleep and catch up on weekends. I used to tell people that I stuck to this schedule because I hated the crowded morning commute otherwise. That was true enough, but I also felt somehow more powerful in being an early bird at work and it certainly did get noticed. One of the senior officers used to joke that he only had one career goal left and that was to beat Rich marin into the office in the morning. That is the sort of headline comment that does a world of good for one’s career.
I look back on those sixteen hour days and can hardly believe that I would do that for some 240 days a year. When I travelled I would wake up at 6am and consider it luxurious. I am thinking about those “good” old days today because I am scheduled for a day of deposition prep via Zoom with the lawyers I am working with on the case. Next week at this time I will be in their New York offices and doing some more prep in person before I go into the lion’s den for the deposition the day after. Depositions are somewhat like boxing match. They have a set time limit of 7 hours with several regular breaks including a lunch break. During those breaks you assess how you’re doing and you patch up any injuries so that you can go in and do battle some more. You get sparing advice from your team when you are resting in the corner and they do their best to be both encouraging and to goad you on to throw a few blockbuster punches. The preparation for the fight is both long-term and then much more focused in the days leading up to the fight. During the short-term prep they are reminding you to keep your gloves up and to move around the ring so that the other side can’t land too many punches. There are always safe haven that you are reminded to seek like falling back on your written opinions when in doubt and declaring certain attempted punches as “outsider the scope” of your testimony. The biggest difference between a boxing match and a deposition is that there is no referee in the room, so rabbit punches and below-the-belt blows are not uncommon and you must be on your guard all the time.
Today is a rarity for me. It is a working day or deposition prep. Given that I am in San Diego and my lawyers are in Baltimore, they have set it for 11am to 3pm PST. That four hours is approximately one third of the time I used to put in at the office back in the day, and Zoom was not yet even a thing. I have set aside my whole day for this purpose and it feels like a full day’s work to me to allocate four hours to this task. I will put in an extra two hours of prep for the prep so that I am as confident and prepared as I can be. I have already put in over 20 hours or rereading my and other opinions to get ready. Most recently i have been reading other deposition transcripts, mostly from fact witnesses from the opposing side. Those are your basic “I don’t know nothin’ about nothin”” depositions, which is not something I, as an expert witness, can get away with. I must be responsive to all questioning including hypotheticals. The trick is not to get boxed in and to especially not say anything that can contradict my written opinions. I know the first 30% of the deposition will be them picking at my background to try to discredit me in any way possible. I am used to this and hold up pretty well under that sort of challenge. I stand pretty confidently on my experience as a senior Wall Street professional and have yet to take many serious body blows over who I am and what I have done in my career life. nevertheless, a seven hour bout is a long match and it is good to prepare by having my lawyers treat me a bit brusquely for several hours to toughen me up the way a trainer slaps a boxer around to get him ready. It’s a fine balancing act of encouragement and challenge.
Strangely enough, the part that everyone always assumed was hard for me in the old commuting days was sticking to the discipline of the schedule and waking up so early. But I actually had little or no trouble with that part of the equation. It was more likely that I would want to go home early than get in any less early. Discipline is a funny thing that often gets overwhelmed by habit and I was in the habit of getting up early and getting to the train. These days, the hardest part is not lasting the seven hours of a deposition day, but getting myself psyched up to make the opening bell for the preparation sessions. It is actually harder for me to wake up and then wait for 11am to roll around than it was to catch the 5:14 train. I guess discipline is something that is made easier by habit and made more difficult through disuse. I am clearly not used to getting up to a scheduled event at this stage of my life and it weighs somewhat heavily on me to do so. Nevertheless, I am up and awaiting the beginning of my first of three deposition prep sessions.
I know the value of deposition prep so I am not adverse to doing it, quite the opposite. I like being prepared and understand its value in performing well. I can know not to do certain things like give long answers, but it is very helpful to be reminded over and over again about that so that I am twitching with readiness on the day of the deposition. I am always reminded of the boxer Roberto Duran who hailed from Panama and Mexico. He boxed in four different weight classes from lightweight to middleweight and was accomplished enough to be word champion several times. The comment he once made has stuck with me and that was, “never shave before a fight”. What that says to me is that you need to go in rough and tough. If you shave, you look too pretty and if you shave, your facial skin is more vulnerable than if you go in unshaven.
I do not plan to take that advice literally, but rather I take it as good mental preparation for the fight. Do not worry about offending because they are doing their best to score points off of me. Do not be too polite, because it is, indeed, a fight. And go in expecting to get hit and toughen your resolve that nothing is going to hurt you. So, today I am in the gym getting ropa-doped by my own team for a few hours, but that is just another work day these days for me.