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.
by Daniel Carey, Senior Trial Technician, A2L Consulting I'm in Chicago and halfway through a one-month arbitration. Seated across from me is opposing counsel. Steve Jobs would have been proud. In the conference room where the arbitration is being held, four out of five attorneys are using iPads, propped in both landscape and portrait, all with Bluetooth keyboards. A Bluetooth keyboard is a wireless keyboard, either similar to a normal wireless keyboard or a pocket-size device that projects a full-size keyboard through infrared technology onto any flat surface. In my last case, in Fairfax, Va., our counsel placed his iPad upon the ELMO (a device normally used to digitally project hard copy documents). The judge asked on the record, "Do you have an app for that?" There is an app for nearly everything these days. The world has changed, and so has my work as a trial technician. As you probably know, a trial technician (sometimes called trial consultant, trial tech or hot-seat operator) goes from trial to trial (or arbitration or hearing) providing litigation support services to the trial team. Specifically, I am normally responsible for: building the exhibit and document database prior to trial; cutting deposition clips and syncing them with a transcript; working with counsel to prep witnesses to work with an electronic presentation; setting up the war room and courtroom with electronics; working to finalize the documentary and demonstrative presentations; running the electronics in the courtroom so that any piece of evidence is accessible instantly; making on-the-fly demonstratives to be used with a witness on cross; running the demonstrative and documentary evidence presentation; All of these tasks ordinarily need to be done on little sleep, and in the trial technician profession, we are not allowed to show stress – ever. In fact, our jobs as trial technicians are to absorb stress. The same is true for technological change in our business. It is inevitable, and it is something that we must absorb. The iPad is bringing rapid change just as PowerPoint once did. It will not be long before jurors are given iPads to use throughout trial (Facebook-disabled, of course). As Peter Summerill, a Utah attorney and author of the MacLitigator blog, has written, “At trial, the iPad really shines. Trial technology should be transparent. This means that it should not appear to the jury as (1) overly flashy; or, (2) a complete headache and a distraction to the attorney. Apple has created a product which facilitates presentation of evidence without getting in the way and does so in a completely unassuming fashion.” Over the last year our technology team has pioneered ways to publish ebriefs on an iPad and to view all case documents and proposed demonstrative exhibits via an iPad app. Now I am seeing iPads spread quickly into courtrooms and arbitration rooms around the country. It is an exciting time, and it is a great time to be a trial technician and a great time to try cases.
In our 16 years in the trial presentation business, and after consulting on more than 10,000 cases, we still hear litigators concerned that their trial presentation/litigation graphics might somehow look “too slick” and will distract the jurors, or will somehow focus attention on the relative wealth of our client who is able to afford “fancy graphics.” In the early 1990s, this was a valid question. No one had used PowerPoint, no one had a cell phone – let alone a smart phone -- few people had personal computers, and most of those had black screens with green text. That is no longer the case. Technology has penetrated into every part of the United States and indeed into most of the world. A 2011 report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project indicates that 85 percent of U.S. adults own a cellphone, 52 percent own a laptop computer, four percent own a tablet, and only nine percent do not own any of these or other devices covered in the study. Those numbers will only increase. According to Robert Gaskins, the creator of PowerPoint, more than 500 million people worldwide use PowerPoint, with over 30 million PowerPoint presentations being made every day. Trial consultant Robb Helt, at the end of a trial in rural Arkansas, was able to talk with the jurors about the use of trial presentation technology/trial techncians in their just-completed trial. Helt found that the theory that jurors are uncomfortable with technology had been “blown away” by this “down home” jury. These jurors were not only comfortable with trial presentation technology – they expected to see it.
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