When the iPad first came out and attorneys began using it as a tool to help present their cases visually, I thought how great it would be if a presentation could be seen by all participants on their own tablet as opposed to projected on a screen. This personal contact with the tablet in their hands would resolve a major limitation on presentations given on a screen, which is a lack of resolution. When you project a presentation, you lose 60 to 70 percent of the resolution you get from your computer screen, and the viewer has to look across a room, which is why you need to make fonts quite big and images quite bold. iPads with retina display have better resolution and can be viewed close up, which means that detailed charts and diagrams are possible to show in a way they would not be if projected.

Wouldn’t it be great if every juror in a jury trial were provided a tablet to view an attorney’s presentation in high resolution? Or, if a group of attorneys could each view a presentation on a tablet during a meeting?

With this idea of presenting directly to other tablets in the back of my mind, I was interested when I recently received an email notice from SlideShark advertising you can “broadcast your slides over the web for FREE this month!” As one who is easily distracted and likes playing with new things, I couldn’t resist trying it out.

First of all, SlideShark is a great program that I recommend for sharing PowerPoint presentations online and on your iPad, iPhone or other tablet. It allows you to easily upload any PowerPoint you have created on your desktop, and it translates the presentation into a web format that also works on an iPad.  Since Microsoft has never released an app that shows PowerPoints on the iPad, it really is the next best thing.  The only downside is that the presentation is not editable on the iPad, so any changes must be made in PowerPoint on your desktop and then re-uploaded as necessary.

That being said, it’s a great way to share presentations with all the animations intact, and to show PowerPoint presentations on the iPad. For a trial team, SlideShark can be used to share the presentation with everyone who needs to see it for comment and revisions without having to send large PowerPoint files to many different people, which is limited by email restrictions on size and bandwidth of the team. (Often a trial team is holed up in a hotel using their Internet, which would limit the download of files but would not restrict viewing the same files online through SlideShark, which takes much less bandwidth.)

SlideShark has a “broadcasting,” or sharing, function that is really quite simple: Since SlideShark requires you to upload the presentation to their server, SlideShark creates a “broadcast” by allowing you to give access to others to see the online presentation through an email invitation. You can send this invitation to anyone, whether they have an iPad, a desktop or whatever, and they can join to see the presentation as you give it so long as they have an active internet connection. As you change a slide on your iPad, a message goes to the server, and it changes the slide being shown to the audience. This is equivalent to using a service like Webex meeting to share your screen and show people whatever is on your screen.

One drawback I noticed is that animations that work on the iPad do not “broadcast” to the viewers. Therefore, you are left only with static screens when broadcasting a presentation. I also noticed a delay that ranged from 2 to 10 seconds on changing the slides. This could well be disconcerting to a presenter. However, the biggest limitation is that the broadcast must go through an active Internet connection, and all devices or computers must have an active connection as well.  While possible in a courtroom, this is hard to set up and makes its application unlikely in the court. In short, the SlideShark broadcast function may work fine for a small meeting over the Internet, but it’s certainly not the app that will allow presentations to tablets in a courtroom (at least yet).

Looking into SlideShark prompted me go back to an app that has been around for a while called Idea Flight that is a more promising app for courtroom use and large meetings. Rather than have the presentation go through a live Internet connection, which causes the delay identified above, Idea Flight uses a WiFi or Bluetooth connection to send the presentation directly to the other iPads or tablets.

While it only will display PDFs, if you are not using animations, then it does a very nice job of sending the presentation to any tablet without any delay.  The presenter can choose a setting whereby the viewer can control the presentation themselves and move forward or back, or they can limit the viewer to only seeing what the presenter is saying at the time. If you are connecting by Bluetooth, you are limited to 4 other devices, but if you are using WiFi, you can have up to 16 people viewing at the same time.  It’s easy to bring a device like an Airport Express ($99) into a courtroom and create a local WiFi network without Internet access. (See this earlier post for how to set up wireless connection to use your iPad in court.)

While I’m still not convinced this is all worth the trouble (let alone the cost of 12 to 16 iPads for the audience), using this technology meetings to allow all the attendees to follow along with their own tablet might well be something worth considering. In any event, it’s always good to be looking forward to what the next technological advance in the courtroom may be.

This assignment to produce SFTLA’s video feels really gratifying since it gives me a chance to delve into the cases and summarize them by interviewing the nominees for Trial Lawyer of the Year. While I don’t try cases anymore—having done so for many years—I still have a litigator’s mindset, and I find the tactical issues that arise out of difficult cases intriguing.

What is notable to me is the great lawyering that occurred on all four cases that were up for the big award. I hope you’ll watch this video that features the attorneys talking about the challenges they overcame on the way to successful verdicts. 

Steven Brady received over $1 million in verdict on a case that many would have settled for under $10,000 (and was handled by two other firms before he took over). There was no issue of liability, only whether the plaintiff suffered any injury in a slow-speed rear-end accident.  This was not an easy case and could have gone either way.  What’s impressive is trying the case with the great danger of losing and putting your all into obtaining that kind of result.

Craig Peters and Anoush Lancaster were a trial team nominated for two cases tried within one week of each other. The first was a motor vehicle accident with good liability against one defendant, but extremely difficult liability against the one with the insurance, and a client that the defense claimed was uninjured. The second was a products liability cases against Caterpillar for a rollover accident that killed a fire fighter while driving their equipment. Not only did they obtain top dollar for both cases, but the logistics of having to finish one case, do all the expert depositions for the second case in the week before trial, and then try a complicated products case is daunting to say the least. Getting through that situation, and prevailing so strongly in both cases, is an amazing accomplishment they should be very proud of.

Chuck Geerhart and Tom Paoli also should feel proud of the great result they received on a case where their client swallowed part of a chicken bone while eating pizza at a Roundtable restaurant. Since a chicken bone is naturally occurring  under California case law, they could not make a claim for strict product liability. That means they had to prove that Roundtable was negligent and Foster Farms, which supplied the chicken, was negligent as well. To try this case, they had to become experts on all aspects of the chicken meat process (which probably wasn’t easy to stomach). I love how this case typifies what being a good attorney so often boils down to: Becoming an expert on an esoteric thing so that you know the issues inside and out for the duration of the case. It is a steep and constant learning curve to understand the issues better than the expert hired by the other side, and it’s what leads to great results like Chuck and Tom got on this case.

The Rick Simons case is truly exceptional—and for that, Rick received the honor of the 2013 Trial Lawyer of the Year award. This case, involving the Jehovah’s Witnesses, was originally referred to Rick by my good friend and pretty much the first client of Cogent Legal ever, Ed Casey. Ed referred the case since Rick had done a number of church molestation cases in the past, and there are issues with those cases that make them difficult. Number one among them is how to handle the huge anger that a jury will feel against the actual perpetrator of the crime, and how to focus that anger on the actions of an organization that was in the best position to stop such crimes. It may sound easy, but it’s not. Rick received the highest verdict ever, $28,000,001, for a single plaintiff, thanks to his hard work, empathy and ability to tell the story of his client and the defendant.

All these finalists really do represent the best about the legal profession when it comes to trial work, which always will be more of an art than a science.  My congratulations to these artists.

The case involved Rincon Towers in San Francisco, which coincidentally is where I used to work; that’s where The Arns Law Firm set up shop when Bob Arns and I opened the firm in 1997. In 2007 Rincon Towers was purchased by the plaintiff in the case, who ultimately lost the property in foreclosure and sued multiple parties, seeking the property back and $40 million in damages. The case was a complex one involving many layers of parties, accountings on the properties and events over time. (For details on the case and the defense victory, read Manatt’s press release here).

Any complex transactional case such as this, which involves a great deal of accounting, lends itself to Excel spreadsheets that, by themselves, are not very helpful and make one’s eyes glaze over. We needed to help the trial team show a chronology of events and economic data based on the facts of the case and the experts’ opinions, so that the team could make their case to the judge as understandable and persuasive as possible. This was a bench trial, not a jury trial, which lends itself to more sophisticated or complex graphics, which are handed off to the judge and clerks so they can refer to them later as they’re writing the opinion.

Below are a few “sanitized” samples in which we changed the names of the witnesses and case information for the purpose of this blog post, but the samples illustrate the nature of the work Cogent Legal did on the case.

The first chart outlines the cash flow in the case. Its purpose was to make clear the order of funding to show no harm could have occurred as claimed by plaintiff. It’s an example of how a basic flow chart can be more understandable and visually appealing with the use of icons and colors. Also, generally speaking, the process of creating a graphic such as this can be an extremely helpful exercise for the trial team to undertake insofar as it aids them in organizing the case and resolving inconsistencies.

The following graphic is a pretty basic bar chart, but it manages to include a good amount of data and to illustrate the relations between the actual data and the projection. I’m including this sample to show how a set of data can be more visually appealing when it’s designed to go with the style of the other visual aids.

The final sample below is an example of a very effective scatter chart on a timeline. It shows an objective valuation of the property in 2007 before the market crash, and then a cluster of third-party valuations of the property after the crash. Up top, at the red star, it shows the plaintiff’s valuation of the property—which is literally “off the chart” and even higher than the pre-crash valuation.

We at Cogent are very happy for the success of the Manatt team. If you are involved with business litigation and would like to discuss how graphics might help your case, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

His presentation, embedded below, covers “Ten Ways to Build a Better Firm.” Thanks to the images and selective use of text,  it’s both inspirational and practical, conveying so much more than words alone could.

In the first place, I love the humor that comes across. However, the main take-away is the simple concept of lots of pictures and only a few words per slide. While graphics for trial obviously have to be a bit less humorous and more staid, the example of using full-frame photos with a partially transparent bar on the bottom for the titles is a good lesson to learn. If you cannot fit your thought on the slide in that small of a space, then you either need another slide, or need to figure out how to edit your concept down. The fact that this presentation has 77 slides means that he would be moving through slides at more than one per minute, which helps keep an audience’s attention.

Secondly, I like the message for attorneys on how to make their practices more innovative by networking, finding mentors and recognizing the inherent stresses of the legal life. I recommend checking it out.

Do you have a Slideshare presentation you’d recommend for attorneys? Please let me know through email or in a comment below because I’d like to spotlight more of them.

First, a little bit of background information on this case: Ms. Parker of La Mesa (San Diego County) and her co-counsel Cassandra Thorson represented Kevin Hoopfer who shoplifted a $35 item from a Fry’s Electronic Store in San Diego. When the security personal saw his shoplifting, one of them followed him out of the store, confronted him and manhandled him to the ground. The defense argued the security guard did nothing more than his job by stopping Mr. Hoopfer and using the force necessary to subdue him when he tried to walk away. However, according to Mr. Hoopfer, he suffered brain damage by the security guard flipping him upside down and smashing his face into the ground.

As a result of the head injury, Mr. Hoopfer has no memory of the incident itself. Luckily for the plaintiff, there was a witness who described the movement of the guard in deposition. Ms. Parker called our office to help with an animation to show this movement.

This animation was extremely difficult to get right in terms of the movement of the two persons to match the perception of the eyewitness. However, once the video was done to the satisfaction of the eyewitness, he confirmed it showed  the movement of the two people properly and would testify under oath at trial that it was an accurate description. Below is the animation that shows a regular-speed view and a slow-motion view, and a view of how Mr. Hoopfer’s brain would hit his skull causing brain injury in the frontal lobe.

At trial, Ms. Parker had a difficult situation with a number of rulings from the bench that were very much in favor of the defense. In particular, the judge was not inclined to allow the animation to come into evidence, even though it simply visualized how the key eyewitness said the incident occurred. (For a legal discussion on getting animations admitted in trial, see my prior post Animation v. Simulation.)

Ms. Parker was not one to give up, however. While the eyewitness was on the stand, Ms. Parker told the judge that if you do not let in the animation, then she wanted to have the 6-foot, 6-inch witness demonstrate  on her what the security guard did by flipping her upside down (and hopefully not hurting her) in open court. The judge relented and let in the above animation.

Ms. Parker told me that the jury literally gasped when they saw the animation, which ultimately had an even stronger impact because the defense had been objecting to showing it throughout the trial in front of the jury, so the jury really wanted to see it.

Ms. Parker said, “Your animation was so very helpful, and I could not have been happier with the efficacy of the animation with the jury.” She added that when you “put a scene in motion like this, people believe it and it becomes the image of the incident that the jury takes back with them during deliberation.”

This case settled after Ms. Parker and Ms. Thorson obtained a finding of liability in the first phase, and a finding of entitled to punitive damages against Fry’s Electronics in the second phase. In speaking with the jury after the settlement, jurors said “the animation was extremely helpful in understanding how this incident occurred and the severity of the impact.”

This case really is an example of “you have to see it to believe it.” My congratulations to Ms. Parker and Ms. Thorson for an amazing result in this case.

I invite you to click on the following links to our portfolio, which contain other examples of animations involving injuries, construction, products, vehicles and more. Please contact me if you have questions about developing an animation for a case.

Devastating visualization in legal case, a brain injury animation cogentlegal.com/blog/2013/03/g…#dataviz #teaching #datavisualization

— Edward Tufte (@EdwardTufte) March 21, 2013

A static timeline can be done on a blow-up board and shown to the jury during any key moment of the case. The downside of a static timeline is that, unless it is really simple with only a few entries, you risk overwhelming the audience with so much information at once that it can be hard for them to understand.

For this reason, we generally recommend attorneys start with an interactive timeline that shows events one at a time so that the jury focuses on a single point as the attorney makes it. The interactive format also allows for document treatments so you can choose a button to reveal key documents that relate to the timeline entry. The following example is from a case (where all the names and dates were modified), and it shows the strong functionality possible with the interactive format. My clients realized that when we finished the timeline with all the dates, entries and documents, not only did they have an engaging, effective tool to present their case; they also had their entire opening statement finished! They could simply go through each entry with the jury in opening and discuss the issues. 

Click the screen shot below, and it will open a separate window to view the interactive Flash timeline. As you click the arrows at the top right-hand corner, you will notice certain entries have a magnifying glass icon. Be sure to click on these, too, to open additional information on that entry, such as document call-outs.

This sample case arises out of a real estate dispute where it was alleged that a buyer of property continued to add numerous expensive extra items to the house he was purchasing, and then tried to back out of the deal after they were built. The bar at the bottom tracked the total cost of upgrades as time went on.

The good thing about this is, it’s built in Flash. The bad thing about it is, it’s built in Flash. What does this mean? Adobe’s Flash allows for unlimited creativity and interactivity—which is great. But, it’s not supported by Apple, so it won’t play on iPads or iPhones—which is frustrating. Therefore, I ask that you view this on your Flash-enabled desktop or device.

Click on image to open separate screen to view Flash Interactive Timeline (must view on Flash-enabled device).

This sample is a great example of the flexibility that a well-designed timeline can give a litigator in most any business, employment, real estate or other case. Click the following links to see another example of an interactive employment timeline and an interactive construction defect timeline.

 If you would like more information on how a timeline can help your case, please do not hesitate to contact me.

The presentation had three parts, with the first part handled by Karen Jo discussing what type of focus group or mock trial you may need depending on what information you seek to obtain. Beth and Andy then followed up with a discussion on issues of confidentiality and how to keep any process as confidential as possible. Lastly, Ron and Andy shared insights on how you take the information you learned from the mock trial and apply it to the actual trial. Attorney Doug Young did a great job moderating.

This terrific panel discussion gave my firm a chance to do a fun slide-based presentation for the jury consultants, which is often not possible in the serious world of litigation. While this presentation (embedded below) was intended to be playful, it provides a good example of some of the techniques I blog about concerning do’s and don’ts for PowerPoint or Keynote presentations.

If you scroll through the presentation slides below (uploaded using a tool I recommend, Slideshare), first you will notice that there are very few words overall. We mainly used pictures, not text, that relate to the topic of discussion. The primary cause of dreaded “death by PowerPoint” is bullet points that the presenter simply reads to the audience as the points show up on the screen. Secondly, audience members appreciate a template style they have not seen before. The background on this slide presentation was custom made in Adobe inDesign so it would look fresh to the viewers. Thirdly, the images chosen are big, clean and immediately understandable without explanation. These three guidelines almost always will guarantee a nicely done presentation that an audience will respond to. (For more advice on creating effective slide-based presentations, please see my post “Five Essential PowerPoint Tips for Attorneys“).

Now, it’s certainly true that litigation presents more circumscribed parameters on what you can present, but each one of the factors above can be used to increase the power and persuasiveness of a visual presentation for mediation or trial.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you’d like to learn more about how Cogent Legal creates multimedia slide-based presentations for attorneys.

Regardless of your politics, and whether you believe that the widening gulf between the poor and super-rich is a serious problem or mere propaganda of the Occupy Movement, I hope you’ll watch this video because it’s a fantastic example of how to show data in an effective and engaging way. In particular, if you’re an attorney who presents cases with large amounts of economic facts and figures, you’ll want to see how this video combines storytelling with clean, simple and powerful data visualization techniques.

One thing I appreciated immediately is the power of the narrator, enhanced by the pacing that he uses. His technique is similar to that of a good attorney giving a closing statement. His speaking is well paced and a creates appropriate tension in that you want to know what he is going to talk about next. The narrator starts with a discussion on the perceived state of income distribution in the United States. If you have not seen the video before reading this, below is the graphic that summarizes the findings, but you might find the summary difficult to understand. This is a terrific example of why in litigation graphics, you want to “build” your argument by revealing information one step at a time, as this video does, until you reach the conclusion; otherwise, you risk confusing your audience.

Rather than hit the viewer with a lot of information all at once, the video starts out with statistics on what people in the U.S. think the distribution of wealth is, and then compares that to what people believe it should be. The narrator shows this with a graph that dynamically slides the percentages to match the new data. Using tools like Adobe Flash, this type of dynamic movement is visually engaging and relatively easy to accomplish.

This “building” of information also sets up a conflict between appearance and reality, since the entire point of the graphic only becomes apparent when he reveals the actual distribution of wealth and compares it to the first two sets of data (what people think it is, and what they believe it should be, as shown in the above screenshot). The effect convinces the viewer that the distribution is much more unequal than most anyone actually imagines. If the above chart were a static board rather than an animated presentation, the tension of appearance vs. reality would be lost because you would immediately see the answer. Additionally, you would risk confusing the audience by having too much information that needs explanation all in one place.

The video then uses essentially the same data, but with different visuals to drive home the same point. It starts out by presenting the total yearly wealth of the U.S. and showing its distribution under the “ideal” scenario.

The video then graphically compares that ideal to the actual distribution of wealth.

By using animation to move from one graphic to the other, the viewer can literally see the changes to the various groups as the numbers change. The video also takes advantage of the fact that numbers at the higher end of the spectrum literally go off the page by pointing this fact out, and then making a separate category to account for the top 1% of income earnings in the United States (where you see the person in the screen shot below on the far right with 40% of the total income for the country).

While people can debate ad nauseam whether this income distribution is good, bad, accurate or exaggerated, there’s no denying that this video does a great job of graphically laying out the facts as a good advocate or trial attorney should do. Imagine trying to follow, understand and remember all of this data if you had your eyes closed and  just listened to the narrator, without watching the video. It would be a lot harder—and less interesting—to follow, wouldn’t it? The same is true when attorneys present fact- and  number-heavy arguments to jurors. Without visual aids, the jurors have a more difficult time following along. Visual aids—especially dynamic, clean graphics that build an engaging narrative—help the attorney hold the jury’s attention and drive the point home.

Your opponent will always have ways to respond to your arguments, but starting with a great presentation that visually guides the viewer through your facts is a powerful way to present your case.

His firm specializes in “Construction Visualization Integration and Building Information Modeling,” which basically means he visualizes and creates models of projects so builders more fully understand the process of the project, discover better ways to build it, and identify problems before they occur. When I saw his work, I was struck by what a great tool this is for the construction industry. This type of computer modeling was impossible only a few years ago, and Mike says that a number of larger clients now require it for any job before the work starts.

You might ask, what does this have to do with litigation?  Well, just like Mike’s clients who never used this process before then realized they cannot do a project without it, attorneys who discover how a case can be visualized and strengthened with graphics at an early stage begin to view litigation graphics as a de facto requirement for case preparation and presentation.

One of Mike’s recent projects provided a great example of how this type of visualization can be vital to a safe work site by showing hazards and errors ahead of time so they can be resolved.

With the 3D modeling capability that is possible now, Mike can create all the models of a crane with the proper length, angles and swings. Therefore, he can determine the lifting capacity at any given location and the exact specifications that will be needed at any point, and see if hazards exist to the workers or the equipment.

In another example, Mike visualized the entire process of installing the temporary shoring on a project, so that all problems could be identified ahead of time.

One of the things I have learned over the years is that to draw something, you have to really understand it. When you have detailed scaled drawings and/or 3D models done for a case early on, you often identify issues that you never would have considered without those visual aids.

For example, seeing a 3D model allows you to see what any person would have seen from their vantage point, and the model can be used in deposition to help cross-examine witnesses. Also, preparing an animation of a process of construction or failure often exposes subtle weaknesses in your theory when it has to be explained in a such precise visual detail.

By developing graphics early in a case, and working on them throughout the litigation, attorneys can avoid major problems, just as construction companies can avoid injuries and costly errors in their work by creating these drawings and models in advance. By developing graphics for mediation and trial, you can help the mediator or jury see your point and understand the case much better.

If you’d like to learn how Cogent Legal can help you with your litigation graphic needs—and help you early on to avoid problems in litigation later—please contact me.

Better late than never, I figure it’s time for me to put in my two cents on the topic and show some examples from the State of the Union Address that might help attorneys improve their own use of charts and graphs in litigation. Visualizing and presenting data in an engaging, persuasive way is critically important for numbers-heavy cases involving financial transactions and economic data. I’ve seen attorneys present graphs and spreadsheets that are about as interesting as watching paint dry. The president’s team, by contrast, created graphs that hold the viewers’ attention and strengthen the points he makes orally.

The day after I watched the address live on TV, I looked at the online “enhanced” version at whitehouse.gov. I am obviously biased, but in particular I admire the president’s address because I really do love seeing graphics used effectively and well. It’s like being a football fan and watching a great football game when everything is done just right.  One thing I like in particular is a point that Ken Lopez made very well: that every slide is “simple enough to understand in a moment or two.”  All of the graphics are simple, yet carry a strong message. They are not intended to be objective, but rather to be like a closing statement when graphics are used to sway the viewer to your point of view.

Let’s look at a couple of ways these graphics use effective techniques to push their point of view fairly but persuasively.

One of my favorite examples shows the job loss that started to end when Obama took office, and the recovery we are in now. It’s even more interesting to look at the differences between the 2013 version and the 2012 version.  Here is the 2013 version of the graphic:

And here is the 2012 version of this graphic:

There are at least two key differences that greatly increase the effectiveness of this graphic in 2013 (besides additional data showing continuing job gains). First of all, the use of the red color in the job loss section (red, of course, being associated with Republicans) makes the overall graphic much more powerful, and the inclusion of the colored font for “Losses” and “Gains” allows for clear understanding of the color use without a key. I also like the use of red, white and blue, which gives a patriotic feel to the entire chart.

The second big difference between the two is a change in the vertical axis. In the 2012 graphic, you can see the very bottom of the chart showing a monthly loss of approximately 800. In the 2013 version, you can see the major loss lines are literally going off the page. Why is that visually important? One, it allows the overall distances between the bottom loss and the highest job gains to be longer and therefore more accentuated in the room available for the graphic. Also, the visual impact of having the major losses go off the page suggests how bad the losses were (almost incalculable).

The following example shows another effective use of color, but it also makes a compelling visual statement by stretching the vertical axis and shrinking the horizontal axis. Compare it with the second graph below, which displays the same data. Because the years in the second graph are included in the horizontal axis and it is much longer, the second graph emphasizes how long the stock market recovery has taken, as opposed to the president’s that emphasizes the fact that it has actually occurred.

 While this post focuses on a couple of economic charts shown during the address, the White House also presented a continuous, effective array of graphics using text and photos to create visual immersion. As the 2011 Persuasion Strategies Visual Persuasion Study by Broda-Bahm’s research team found, graphics used continuously, so that imagery is shown throughout the presentation, has many advantages. I encourage you to view more samples in the enhanced version of the State of the Union Address for ideas and inspiration that you can use in your next case presentation.