30-30 man, I take your point on limiting your liabilities.
We try to limit our liabilities with planning and positioning. We pre-plan every drive identifying our shoot/no shoot zones with a special emphasis on nearby farmyards, and take special care to ensure that our point men are placed so that once the deer are clear of the bush, everyone can shoot with no crossfires possible. To minimize deflections, I go one step further by using light for the calibre bullets such as 125gr in .30 calibre, and 110gr in the .270 (loading some for next year, 110gr deer bullets in the .270 are recent) . These shoot straight as a string for practical distances, then die off fairly rapidly.
The .25's and smaller already use relatively light bullets, and are already unlikely to deflect much of a chunk of lead once they have made contact with the ground. Once they contact something, and deform, they are probably not much more hazardous over all than a .36 calibre ball (buck shot).
We drive deer without dogs (dogs illegal here) and we use rifles. Shotguns are never seen except in a couple of areas that are shotgun only. I have not actually ever seen one in actual use in a lifetime of hunting.
Shots under 100 yards happen but are rare (I have had 3 in my life, 2 last year), and our point men are rarely closer than 200 yards from each other. We push small and medium sized bluffs into generally open fields. Six to seven people are considered a large hunting group including drivers and point. We trade duties each drive.
