What Life Care Planners Need From a Deposition Summary

Before a life care planner prices a single future surgery, someone has to answer a plain question: who said it was needed, under oath, and how sure were they?

Medical records rarely answer all of that. A chart shows what was ordered and what was done. A deposition shows what a treating physician expects the plaintiff to need next, what the plaintiff says they can and can't do today, and where a defense expert disagrees. For a life care planner (LCP), those answers sit at the foundation of the plan, and a standard deposition summary built for the trial team often buries them.

So what should a summary look like when the reader is the planner? Let's go through what the LCP needs, witness by witness, and then the format that puts it in one place.

The chart shows what was ordered; the deposition shows what's happening

A life care plan projects care forward from the plaintiff's current situation, and depositions are often the only sworn source for that current situation. A physical therapy order in the chart doesn't tell you whether the plaintiff still goes. The plaintiff's deposition might.

The testimony worth pulling out for a planner usually includes:

• Therapy, injections or appointments the plaintiff says they still attend, stopped, or never started, and the reason they gave.
• Help at home: who provides it, which tasks, and roughly how many hours the witness described.
• Equipment in use, such as a cane, brace, shower chair or modified vehicle, and whether it was prescribed or bought on their own.
• Medications the plaintiff says they take, which may not match the prescribing record.
• Transportation limits that affect getting to care.

A spouse or adult child who provides care can matter as much as the plaintiff here. Family testimony about attendant care is easy to skim past in a transcript, and it's exactly the detail a planner has to quantify.

This overlaps with the functional testimony a plaintiff's attorney tracks, which we cover in our post on damages testimony that sits outside the injuries section. The planner's version is narrower: it's the testimony that shows what care exists now, so the plan has a real starting point.

Future care recommendations: capture how often, how long, and how firmly

When a treating physician testifies about future care, the summary should record the recommendation exactly as stated, including frequency, duration and the witness's level of certainty. A planner can't price "ongoing therapy." They can work with "twice a week for another six months, then reassess," if that's what the witness said.

So for each future-care statement, capture:

• The item: surgery, injection series, therapy, imaging, medication, equipment, home modification.
• Frequency and duration in the witness's words. If the physician said "probably yearly," the summary says "probably yearly," not "annually."
• How firmly it was stated: recommended, likely, possible, or "if symptoms continue."
• Conditions attached: "if the fusion doesn't hold," "once she's cleared by neurology."
• The page and line where it was said.

Don't convert anything. Turning "every few months" into "four visits a year" is a planning judgment, and it belongs to the planner. The same discipline of keeping a treating physician's facts separate from their opinions, which we walk through in keeping a treating physician's fact and opinion testimony apart, applies here with one addition: the planner needs the numbers the witness gave, untouched.

When the physician defers, record who they deferred to

Treating physicians often decline to answer future-care questions outside their specialty. "I'd leave that to pain management" or "that's a question for her neurologist" can look like a non-answer in a summary. For a planner, it's a lead.

Every deferral should be recorded with the specialty or provider the witness named. That referral trail tells the planner and the retaining attorney where medical support for a recommendation still needs to come from, whether that's a record request, a physician consultation or another deposition. Defense reviews of life care plans commonly point to care that no treating physician ever prescribed, so knowing exactly who hasn't weighed in yet is useful to plaintiff and defense planners alike.

Where the testimony and the chart disagree, flag it and leave it open

A deposition summary for a life care planner should flag every place where testimony and medical records disagree on a care-related fact, and it shouldn't try to settle which one is right. The plaintiff may say they use a walker daily while recent therapy notes describe independent gait. A physician may recommend a revision surgery that appears nowhere in their own records.

Those differences are exactly what a defense planner will ask about and what a plaintiff's planner has to address, so the summary puts both versions next to each other: the testimony with its page and line, the record with its date and source. What the difference means for the plan is the planner's call, made with the treating providers and the attorney. The same goes for defense medical examiners who disagree with a treater's recommendation: record the disagreement and who holds each position.

A medical chronology built for life care planning handles the record side of that comparison. The deposition summary supplies the sworn side.

A future-care testimony crosswalk the planner can work from

The most useful format for an LCP is a crosswalk: one row for each future-care item mentioned in any deposition, drawing together every witness who spoke to it. Columns that work well:

1. Care item as described in testimony.
2. Witness and role: treating surgeon, therapist, plaintiff, spouse, defense examiner.
3. What was said, including frequency, duration and any conditions, quoted where precision matters.
4. Certainty as stated.
5. Page and line.
6. Record check: supported, not found, or conflicting, with the record citation.
7. Open questions: deferrals, missing opinions, disagreements between witnesses.

A planner can scan that table and see, item by item, what's supported, what's contested and what's still missing. The traditional witness-by-witness summary can still sit behind it for the full context of each deposition.

Building a crosswalk like this across several depositions is careful, clinical reading work. LezDo TechMed's deposition summary services can organize future-care testimony for planners, with medical and paramedical reviewers and a three-layer quality-control review before delivery.

Send the depositions early, summarized for the planner

Life care planners often get deposition transcripts late, and in full, with the records. When they arrive already organized around future care, the planner spends that time checking foundation instead of hunting for it.

A deposition summary won't tell anyone what care the plaintiff needs or what it will cost. Those are the planner's professional judgments, made with the treating physicians and the retaining attorney. What the summary can do is make sure every future-care statement in the testimony is found, quoted accurately, tied to its page and line, and checked against the chart, so the plan rests on what witnesses actually said.