A Players List can be a proactive tool to help a litigation paralegal manage all of the names that you come across throughout your litigation cases.  The Players List also becomes your draft Trial Witness List when you start preparing for trial.  A Players List is helpful because you will have all of the key witness information available at your fingertips throughout the life of a case. 

What is a Players List? It is a list of all of the people involved in the case, whether they are a witness, opposing counsel, paralegal, or other people who have a role in the case.

How to Start a Players List

To start a Players List – For every pleading, discovery response, interview note, documents produced, and deposition transcript that comes in on the case, you’ll want to extract all names into an Excel spreadsheet with the following fields of information:

1. First Name
2. Last Name (have each column contain the least amount of information possible so that you can quickly sort and filter the entire spreadsheet)
3. Role (their role in the case, not their job title)
4. Source (where you’re getting their name from)
5. Street Address (makes it easy for service of process later on)
6. City
7. State
8. Work Phone
9. Mobile Phone
10. Email
11. Job Title
12. Interviewed
13. Deposition Date
14. Trial Witness

Why have a Players List?

By having all of the names and information in one place, you will also have a list ready when the attorney wants to decide who needs to be interviewed, deposed, or subpoenaed for trial.  And because cases can last for years, you’ll be able to quickly answer the attorney’s question, “who is Jay Smith, and why is he on the opposing counsel’s witness list?”

Additionally, since you’re reviewing each of the pleadings and discovery responses as they come in on the case, you will know about upcoming deadlines and be able to proactively assist the attorney by having more time to prepare for those deadlines.  For example, after reviewing the new pleadings filed each day, you know that there is a deposition of one of the parties coming up next month.  Now you can get started on preparing the deposition prep notebook rather than waiting until the attorney asks you to start gathering documents and things for the deposition.