By Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting When your trial technology fails, you fail in the eyes of your jury.
by Ken Lopez Founder & CEO A2L Consulting Some people make a habit of denigrating Twitter, saying that its well-known 140-character limit makes it useless for anything substantive. There are several responses. First, it’s possible to link to anything on the Web within a tweet (just use one of the common URL-shortening utilities), so lots more information can be conveyed. Second, a lot of people read more on Twitter than they write. They use it as a sort of personal news feed, scrolling down for a few minutes at a time during the work day to see what’s new. If you pick the right accounts to follow, this works very well.
by Ken Lopez Founder & CEO A2L Consulting If you saw the Super Bowl this past Sunday, you saw some interesting things.
by Ken Lopez We are always interested in knowing what interests our readers – so that we can offer more helpful information on this blog as we refine our interests and learn what our readers want.
by Theresa Villanueva, Esq. Director, Litigation Consulting A2L Consulting
These days, only a very few cases can be said to have an unlimited litigation budget, but some still do. As the amount at stake in toxic tort, technology patent and product liability cases soars into the billions of dollars, we do hear from clients that they must win at all costs. Indeed, at A2L Consulting, it is common for us to work on multi-billion dollar disputes. Thus far in 2012, we have already consulted on cases with over $30 billion at stake. In this two-part series, we share the menu of options available to a law firm and its client in situations at the opposite ends of the litigation consulting budget spectrum. What is possible when budget is not an issue, and what is possible when budget is severely constrained? By far the biggest difference between unlimited budget cases and limited budget cases is the amount of time that can be devoted to the discussion and testing of alternative strategies. There are three key areas of trial and pre-trial work: trial consulting, litigation graphics and courtroom technology support. A high-budget case can involve several trial consultants, a dozen or more artists, hundreds of demonstrative exhibits, several mock trials, months of work and an overall onsite litigation consulting and trial technology team with between four and 12 people.
After a year of providing expert commentary on trials, litigation graphics, jury research, courtroom hot seat best practices and similar topics, I think it’s time to take stock.
Indata's Trial Director has become the dominant trial presentation specialty software, second only to PowerPoint in courtroom use. It is a powerful tool that is available to trial lawyers and to litigation consultants and represents the state of the art.
The old-fashioned deposition, with the court reporter recording every word and producing a written transcript, is giving way to the video deposition, which permits a jury and judge to actually see the witness and get a feeling for his or her style and credibility that can’t be obtained by looking at a printed page. In addition, the witness’s body language, which was completely opaque in a written deposition, is now available to the jury.
TrialDirector, a trial presentation software package produced by InData, is an indispensable aid to the presentation of electronic and other evidence at trial. There is a reason why this product has claimed the majority of the market share for trial presentation software for more than 10 years: It can actually make it interesting for a jury or other fact-finder to listen to a witness testify about corporate balance sheets, long-ago emails, and other documents that can be fatally boring and lose the attention of the fact-finder.
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