by Ken Lopez Founder & CEO A2L Consulting
by Ken Lopez Founder & CEO A2L Consulting There’s no question that in this decade, lawyers looking to improve their trial practice skills cannot afford to ignore blogs, how-to videos and other visual media. We wrote recently about the best blogs and best LinkedIn groups for litigators and litigation support, and, of course, many other social media outlets exist as well.
by Ken Lopez Founder & CEO A2L Consulting If you saw the Super Bowl this past Sunday, you saw some interesting things.
by Theresa Villanueva, Esq. Director, Litigation Consulting A2L Consulting
Ryan H. Flax, (Former) Managing Director, Litigation Consulting
A2 Consulting is proud to release its largest e-book to date – the BIG Litigation E-Book for Litigators and Litigation Support. With more than 75 pages of specific, litigation-focused content drawn from actual trials, this book contains a wealth of valuable information for any litigator. While the book is geared toward litigators trying big cases – those with $10 million or more at stake – there is something here for all litigators. We think it’s invaluable for anyone who is conducting a trial before a jury or judge, in federal or state court. In more than 25 articles, the courtroom experts at A2L cover such topics as storytelling for litigators, mock testing of litigation graphics and arguments, making great opening statements, researching your judge, preparing timelines, and working with the difficult expert witness.
I want our readers to be among the first to hear some good news and download a free copy of a useful guidebook. A2L Consulting was voted a Best Demonstrative Evidence Provider by the readers of the National Law Journal. We are very proud. It's the second time in less than a year we have been honored with a similar distinction. At the end of 2011, the readers of LegalTimes also voted and named A2L the Best Demonstrative Evidence provider. I believe that this guide just published by the National Law Journal is a valuable one to keep. We all know one thing about litigation: you only get one shot to get it right, and thus it is critical to hire the right support team. The NLJ's best of guide is a good guidebook for anyone looking to hire a litigation support firm or other legal services firm. Frankly, it's a credible reader-driven survey that's been missing for a long time. I think the NLJ's work is especially reliable and useful since over 450 companies were nominated and votes were only tallied for known members of the legal industry. Below is a link to download the guidebook. I hope you'll take a moment to leave a comment below or ask a question. Thank you for your support of A2L Consulting and The Litigation Consulting Report.
Whenever a litigation team presents a document in a graphic way to the jury or other fact-finder at trial, there is an occasion for a document call-out. A “document call-out” is a term of art that means taking a document that is in evidence at trial and highlighting some key portion of it for easy reading and to draw the viewer's attention to the key language.
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.
A recent study about the best use of litigation graphics during trial reveals some new insights. This study was conducted by Persuasion Strategies, a litigation consulting firm that is part of Holland & Hart, a law firm. The study team was led by Ken Broda-Bahm, a leader in the art of visual presentation in the courtroom. With a doctorate in speech communication that emphasizes rhetoric and legal communication, Dr. Broda-Bahm is a genuine expert in jury consulting.
We often hear from clients or prospective clients that it won’t help them if they look like a big company that is attempting to overwhelm or dazzle its opponents with technology. Jurors won’t buy that sort of stuff, we are told, even from a litigant that is actually a large company.
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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