§ 2025.460.Objections; disclosure of privileged information or protected

What an attorney says, or fails to say, during a deposition can determine what evidence survives to trial, and this section sorts those consequences into three buckets. First, a claim that information is privileged or protected attorney work product is waived unless someone raises a specific objection to its disclosure right there at the deposition; staying silent while an opposing party asks a privileged question can cost the privilege entirely.

Second, a broad category of errors and irregularities in how the deposition was conducted, covering everything from the manner of taking testimony to the oath administered, to the conduct of anyone present, to the form of a question or answer, gets waived the same way unless promptly objected to, though the deposition keeps going subject to the objection unless the objecting side demands a suspension to seek a protective order. Third, and in the opposite direction, objections to a deponent's competency or to the relevancy, materiality, or admissibility of testimony or materials at trial need not be raised at all during the deposition; those are preserved automatically.

The section also protects a party who hits a wall mid-deposition: if the deponent will not answer a question or produce something the notice or subpoena called for, the questioning party can adjourn or move on to other topics without losing the right to later move to compel under Section 2025.480. And where a deponent later asserts, after producing electronically stored information, that the material is privileged or work product, the claw-back procedure in Section 2031.285 takes over from there.