Under certain circumstances, a court may need to hold some kind of pretrial hearing and make evidentiary rulings to resolve important issues like personal jurisdiction, or whether to impose sanctions for extreme misconduct by parties or counsel.
As with trials, a party or their counsel normally raises objections to evidence presented at the hearing in order to ask the court to disregard impermissible evidence or argument, as well as to preserve such objections as a basis for interlocutory or final appeals from such rulings.
In addition, at the end of the trial, the attorney had to submit a written "bill of exceptions" that listed all exceptions he intended to appeal on—which the judge then signed and sealed, making it part of the record to be reviewed on appeal.
[3] Parliament solved that problem with the 31st chapter of the Statute of Westminster 1285, which forced trial court judges to apply their court's seal to a party's written bill of exceptions and in turn allowed the bill to become part of the appellate record.
Courts normally discourage speaking objections and may sanction them when they impede legal process, whether by delaying the proceedings or by adding non-evidentiary material to the record.
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require objections during a deposition to be stated "concisely in a nonargumentative and nonsuggestive manner."