Errata sheet

Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 30(e) — and state analogues — a deponent who requests review has a window (30 days under the federal rule) to submit changes “in form or substance” with reasons for each. The errata sheet is where those changes live, signed and appended to the transcript.

The fight it creates

The controversy is the word substance. Some courts read Rule 30(e) literally and allow a deponent to reverse an answer outright; others apply the “sham affidavit” doctrine and strike substantive rewrites that contradict sworn testimony, especially when they appear timed to defeat summary judgment. Where your court falls on that spectrum changes how you take depositions and how you attack the other side’s corrections.

The fight often resurfaces months later, when deposition designations are exchanged before trial and the corrected passages are exactly the ones both sides want read.

Either way, the original answer rarely disappears: in most jurisdictions the first version remains part of the record and is fair game for impeachment. A witness who changed “yes” to “no” on an errata sheet has usually traded one bad answer for two — the original and the correction, plus the reason offered for it.

Working the errata in the record

Errata changes are exactly the kind of quiet edit that gets lost in a case file. In a FactMarshal matter, the corrected testimony sits alongside the original with both cited, so a substantive change surfaces the same way any conflict does — side by side, ready for the cross-examination it usually deserves.