How to Depose the Nursing Home DON — A Practical Playbook for Plaintiff Attorneys

By John Mahoney · 11-minute read · Published April 18, 2026

The Director of Nursing is the single most consequential witness in most nursing-home cases. They own the care plans, they sign off on the incident reports, they train the staff, and they're the person who — on paper — was responsible for knowing every resident's clinical status. A tight DON deposition can turn a soft case into a strong one. A loose DON deposition will give the defense a witness to lean on at trial. This post is the playbook we've put together from watching, assisting on, and analyzing DON depositions in nursing-home cases.

Before you notice the deposition

Subpoena these documents first

1. The DON's personal training file — CEs, in-service attendance records, any documented disciplinary history
2. Every in-service training roster and curriculum for the 24 months before your resident's injury, plus the 6 months after
3. Every morning meeting minutes / stand-up notes for the 30 days before and after the incident
4. The facility's policies and procedures manual — specifically the pressure-injury, fall-prevention, weight-loss, elopement, and incident-reporting sections. Get the versioned history.
5. All incident reports for the same unit for the 90 days before and after your incident. Pattern of prior incidents is discoverable.
6. Staffing schedules with actual signed time-in/time-out for your resident's unit, for the 30 days around the incident
7. Any 24-hour report or clinical-meeting notes that mention your resident
8. The facility's state survey results for the preceding 3 years, plus any plan-of-correction filings

The DON may try to claim they "weren't personally familiar" with your resident. If the resident appears in any 24-hour report, care-plan conference, or clinical meeting they attended, that defense falls apart. Subpoena broadly.

Draft the topic map before you draft questions

Build a one-page map organized around the five high-leverage topics:

• Knowledge and responsibility. What did they know about this resident? What SHOULD they have known? What systems were supposed to surface the risk?
• Training and supervision. Who trained the front-line staff on pressure-injury prevention, fall prevention, and weight monitoring? When? How often? Were the training rosters signed by actual attendees?
• Policies vs practice. What does the facility's written policy say about Q2H repositioning, 24-hour skin checks, weight trending? What actually happened?
• Response to deterioration. When the nurse documented the first concerning sign, what should have happened next? What actually happened?
• Post-incident response. Who investigated? What did they find? Was there a root-cause analysis? Was the care plan updated?

The five topics most attorneys miss

1. The Minimum Data Set as the DON's admission

The DON does not personally complete MDS assessments, but they're responsible for the nursing staff who do, and the facility uses those assessments to set the care plan and bill Medicare. Walk them through the MDS Section G scoring for your resident: "This scoring means the resident needed extensive assistance, correct? That's what the facility told Medicare?" Then contrast with the Braden Scale from the same day showing a much higher mobility score. Every DON has to pick one: either the MDS was accurate (and the care plan was inadequate) or the Braden was accurate (and the MDS was fraudulent). There's no third door.

2. The staffing-vs-acuity math

Get their admission that the facility staffs based on "resident acuity" or "resident care needs." Then walk them through your resident's daily acuity level and the nurse-to-resident ratio on each shift in the 72 hours before the incident. Most plaintiff attorneys ask about staffing levels generically — the high-leverage version pins the DON to the facility's own acuity-based staffing formula and then shows the formula was violated for this specific resident on this specific day.

3. The written policy the DON didn't follow

The facility almost always has a written policy requiring Q2H repositioning for high-Braden residents, or 15-minute fall checks for a post-fall resident. Get the DON to confirm the policy, confirm the policy applies, confirm they're responsible for compliance. Then show the repositioning notes that only document checks every 4–6 hours, or the post-fall flowsheet that went blank for 3 hours. Policy-violation cases settle better than pure-expert cases.

4. The prior incidents they've never heard of

Pull up the incident reports for the same unit for the 90 days before your incident. Ask the DON about each one. If they can't remember the incident on their own unit from six weeks before, that's either dishonesty or they weren't doing their job. If they DO remember, ask what they did about it — was the care plan changed for other residents? Was training re-done? If there was a pattern of three falls on the same hallway in the 60 days before your resident fell and the DON did nothing, that's a plaintiff's dream.

5. Their own certification renewal

Many DONs let their RN certification or their state-specific administrator's license slip during stressful periods. Their CE records are subpoenable. If they were working for six months without current certification, that's a standard-of-care question on whether they were even legally allowed to hold the DON title. This isn't case-deciding on its own, but it's a factual hook for cross and it's something defense counsel won't have prepared them for.

Impeachment set-ups — the two-question technique

Good DON impeachment isn't about the one gotcha question. It's about the two-question pair:

1. Setup question. Extract an abstract principle or policy statement. "When a resident has a Braden score below 12, the facility's policy is to implement Q2H repositioning, correct?"
2. Ambush question. Apply that principle to a specific fact from the chart. "I'm showing you exhibit 7 — the repositioning flowsheet for Mrs. K on March 14. It shows entries at 6 AM, 11 AM, and 6 PM, correct? So the gap between 11 AM and 6 PM is seven hours?"

The DON is trapped. They either admit the policy was violated or they backpedal on the policy. Neither is a good option for the defense.

Using live deposition analysis during the depo itself

DON depositions routinely run five to six hours and produce transcripts of 200–300 pages. You cannot physically re-read the transcript during the deposition to catch contradictions. Live deposition-analysis tools — like our Courtroom AI — transcribe in real time and flag contradictions with the chart, with the DON's earlier answers, and with their sworn facility 30(b)(6) testimony if you've fed those in. The tool doesn't replace your judgment — it gives you a two-sentence prompt during the break that says "at 14:32 the witness said the policy is Q2H repositioning; at 09:17 they said Q3H was acceptable. Consider re-asking." That's the difference between catching the contradiction in cross at trial six months later and catching it while the witness is still in the chair.

The closing block — what you want in the transcript

Before you rest your deposition, get these three admissions on the record:

• The DON is responsible for ensuring the facility complies with its own policies and procedures (so later admissions of non-compliance land on them)
• The DON does not delegate the responsibility for the care-plan review process to anyone else in a way that relieves them of accountability
• The DON was specifically aware of (or should have been aware of, given their role) the resident's high-risk status at the time of the incident

You now have a witness who owns the care plan, owns policy compliance, and was on notice about the resident. Everything else is details.