Best Witness Interview Summary Formats: Chronological vs. Topic Based

You’re a legal professional who just conducted a great witness interview where you learned valuable information. So how do you summarize the interview so that others can read and work with the important information you just learned?

If you are a legal professional who has struggled with determining the best format to use to summarize the witness interviews you conduct, this piece is for you.

I’ll explain the two most common approaches to witness interviews, and the benefits and drawbacks to each approach. And, which approach, during my 30 plus years of conducting witness interviews for civil and criminal litigation, and 3rd party fact-finding, I found best for quickly communicating important information to my attorney clients.

In previous pieces I explained why I believe note taking instead of mechanically recording during witness interviews enhances the effectiveness of a witness interview (read here), and another piece to help improve the quality of the notes you take (read here).

So now let’s dive into how you summarize the interviews you conduct.

Chronological Summary Format

The most common approach to preparing a witness interview summary is the chronological format. With this approach you summarize the information in the chronological order in which the witness tells you the information.

The benefits to this approach are two-fold:

• It allows you to maintain the narrative feel of the witness’s information including the flow of how she tells the story.
• And for you, it allows you to prepare your summary more quickly as you follow the sequence of your notes. It’s an easier process too, as you don’t need to hunt for specific information.

There is; however, one big negative.

And that is it is much more difficult to communicate to the reader the information that is most important for them to learn about quickly. They have to spend time reading through the entire narrative to pick out the information that matters most.

And as anyone who has ever worked for or with attorneys knows. Their time is in short supply.

Topic Based Summary Format

In a topic based interview summary, you break down the summary into different topics, and document the information that relates to each specific topic. Typically, you start at the top with the most important topics based upon your theory of the case, and work your way through the topics in descending order of importance.

The benefits of this approach are significant—especially for the reader:

• You prioritize and identify the most important information and make it as accessible as possible to the reader. This allows the reader to QUICKLY understand what information you learned during the interview in the ORDER OF IMPORTANCE in the theory of the case.
• It forces you to really focus on and better understand the possible testimony a witness can provide as it relates to the theory of the case. In essence it helps to separate the wheat from the chaff.
• It is an easier format to work from when preparing a declaration.

The biggest downside to topic based interview summary formats is it takes you longer to prepare the summary as you have to read through your notes and determine the information that is most important to communicate, and then the next most important piece of information, on down the line. So you also need to be able to analyze the information you learn from an interview and how it fits into the theory of the case.

I preferred to use a topic based summary for the majority of the witness interviews I conducted. I found that it was the most effective at conveying what the attorneys needed to learn about the witness’s information.

As a result, to me it made the attorney’s life a bit easier, by quickly drawing their attention to the big elements of potential testimony. And while it took me longer to prepare, I think it also helped me to better understand our theory of the case, which helped me maximize the benefits of each witness interview I conducted.

Would conducting more effective litigation investigations help your firm help maximize your case outcomes. If so, check out my eBook on Effective Litigations Investigations. You’ll learn how to get the most from your witness interviews, how to locate hard to find witnesses, how to obtain public records that are easily admissible and can be used to prove or disprove facts, and to impeach testimony. Learn more below.

Also check out my free on-demand workshop on conducting more effective witness interviews. I take you through the six steps needed to get the most from your witness interviews.