I think it was a combination of things, but I think the thing that was most important is he hadn’t been well-prepared for the process of a examination. A examination under oath by an experienced litigator is very different from what a chief executive or really sort of any businessperson ordinarily goes through. Ordinarily their trying to simple make their point, sell their product or service, defend their position, and they move on.

And they don’t get tough questions usually, and if they do they don’t get tough follow-up questions. They get to determine the subject matter. They control, usually, the dialogue. In a deposition or a trial examination, the roles are reversed. The examiner determines the subject matter. The examiner determines where you go. The examiner determines when the examinations over with.

And there’s no way they can cut it off. And when they’re used to being in control, it’s hard for them to understand and emotionally get it across that they’ve just gotta be patient. They’ve just gotta listen to the question, given an answer to the question, not try to shut the examination down, not try to blow the examiner away, cause you can’t do that. The examiner has all the advantages.

The witness is up there answering questions. The examiner’s got all these books and papers and able to look things up and got people helping them. So, the witness is very vulnerable. The only thing the witness has, and it’s important, is the witness gets to give the answers, and what the witness has to do is be sure those answers are simple, direct, and don’t open up doors, and don’t make the witness look like they’re trying to evade the question.

Now, that takes training, and I don’t know whether he didn’t want to give the time to prepare, whether his lawyers didn’t push him hard enough to prepare. No one will ever know exactly what led to that, but the problem that he had, I think, was a lack of preparation. A lack of understanding what the nature of that examination process was going to be.