§ 2028.010.Procedures applicable

Not every deposition needs a lawyer and a witness in the same room asking and answering questions live. This section opens the door to an alternative: a party can obtain discovery through a deposition by written questions, where the questions are prepared in advance and a deposition officer reads them to the deponent and records the answers, rather than an attorney conducting a live examination.

Rather than build a separate procedural framework from scratch, this section borrows what already exists. The procedures for taking oral depositions inside California under Chapter 9, and outside California under Chapter 10, apply equally to a written deposition, except wherever this chapter's own rules say something different. That borrowed framework covers things like notice and the deposition officer's role; what follows in this chapter fills in the pieces unique to a written format, from the questions themselves to the objection process.