Voir Dire Exhibit Board – Negligence

With two more trials coming up next week I went ahead and prepared some “stock boards” as we like to call them. We offer them to our clients to show the panel the actual legal definitions, rather than trying to explain from notes. We often ship these to the city we are working in and have them mounted locally as well.

While this is a Voir Dire example, using boards in litigation is effective with everything from opening statement to expert witnesses to closing arguments. With the ability to leave them laying around where the jury always gets a constant reminder of what is one them we are huge advocates of combining these with trial presentations.

Here’s an example of Negligence:

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Simple Features of Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat has some amazing and simple features that do not come in the free download of Adobe Reader. Probably one of my personal favorites, is the ability to combine .pdf’s, insert and extract pages as well as separate all pages into separate files. Ok, simple you say whats so amazing about that? Well from experience, I know it’s time consuming to open a document page-by-page, document-by-document. It’s convenient to combine them, and be able to scroll through all of the pages at once without having to open and close files. Also sometimes you may only want to produce certain pages, the extract pages feature then might come into play. Until next time…

Soft Tissue Attorneys’ Deposition Technique [video]

In this example my client was able to save the expense of live testimony. At the same time, he got his demonstrative evidence of the surgery admitted, and sometimes getting this sort of evidence admitted can be an authoritative issue if you have no one in court to prove it up.

While completing some last minute synch’ing for one of the two trials that we provided litigation support for last week, I came across a great technique that I had never seen done before.

My client pulled up the doctor’s website (the deponent), where he had an animation of the surgery that was preformed waiting to be played back. The camera focused on the laptop screen and this is what the jury saw (remember it’s a 100″ screen they’re viewing this on):

5 Q. All right. Thank you. And the — Those slides
6 as well as the chart that you described earlier, do
7 those reasonably and accurately depict this type of –
8 of surgery and also the condition that you described for
9 us earlier?
10 A. Yes.

While it may not be on the top of your “what to do in a deposition” list, it’s wise to consider displaying your demonstrative evidence while in the video deposition.

Medical Illustrations

Listening to a doctor explain a procedure is one of the most difficult topics for a jury to visualize. Any case that involves injuries, whether it be a medical malpractice suit or a car wreck benefits from a quality medical illustration or animation. DLS does not create our own medical illustrations for use in our presentations, this is a very specialized field that takes a graphic designer with an extensive medical background. We suggest our clients to use a company based out of Dallas named MediVisuals.



While I can’t attest to how many illustrations they have, I do know that I’ve never had a client make a request they couldn’t produce. The downfall of using a company such as MediVisuals is the cost, while each illustration differs in price, they are normally very cost prohibitive for smaller cases (car wrecks), but are extremely useful if your case can justify the cost.

The next time you have a case involving an injury or botched medical procedure, put yourself in a jurors shoes… Would you be able to visualize what your expert is discussing? If not, I highly recommend using medical illustrations or animations.

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Verticle Timeline in PowerPoint

During the course of our online creation process, I’m routinely presented with a piece of paper with events on it. Timeline’s are important in almost all litigation. Upon reviewing the material from this presentation, I counted a total of 12 different events that the attorney wanted to present. All on the same slide.

This seems to be a substantial problem in litigation presentations. The “average” lawsuit always contains too many points the attorney wants to make. Trimming those down to be as specific and important as possible is always my number one priority. Unfortunately in this case, all 12 points needed to be made.

I originally tried to fit all of the data in horizontally as I feel juries have an easier time reading from right to left. Version after version I could not make all the data fit and still be decipherable…That is until I decided to use a vertical timeline and was able to make it all come together, as you can see below!

One Tech to Serve Them All?

I’ve worked for both sides on multiple occasions and oddly enough the majority of the time it’s at the request of my client. Cost is the reason I see it being suggested the most. The question you have to ask yourself is; will I save enough to make it beneficial to my case?

If the case is straight forward (we still work a lot of car wrecks) and there really isn’t much trial strategy involved other than presenting the evidence and facts, I think it can be very useful. Our role in these cases usually involves making clips, and calling up documents. I might create a few opening/closing slides for either side. And that’s about it.

Note that it does benefit both sides, the speed of the trial, and the general organization of the parties. In many matters, if the costs weren’t shared it would not be cost effective to use our services in the trial. It is amazing how quickly a trial speeds up when there is very little fumbling around and looking for misplaced exhibits. I think the jury, judge, and court staff appreciate it as well. Everything just flows smoother.

Now that’s a small minority of the cases that benefit from the use of Trial Technology, and the only situation where I would suggest or support the idea. Where technology really shines is when the case is complex, hard to understand, and involves hundreds of videos and hundreds of thousands of documents. In these situations I think the experience, knowledge and overall qualities of the individual Trial Tech’s come into play.

Another benefit of is on many occasions I pull a document up for my client and when the opposing attorney wants to cross examine on that document, they find they don’t have it scanned. This doesn’t happen when the Tech is working on both sides. Either it’s loaded or not (and when it’s not we rush to scan it).

Those two “convenience” reasons are the only real reasons why a large trial should share a Tech. Cost should not be one, and these are the reasons I explain to my clients:

You need independence to gain an additional outside view. A competent Trial Tech might have some great suggestions for topics/questions the attorney might have overlooked. When I’m working on both sides, I keep my mouth shut.

Also, the added stress of having giving your trial strategy to someone that is working for the other side makes for some awkward situations. I’ve never run been asked about the trial strategy of my client from opposing counsel, but if you potentially had millions at stake, how would you feel about having open trial strategy communications in front of “some guy” that is about to go meet with your adversary? It just doesn’t work. This single issue is big enough to forget about sharing a trial tech, we’re just too involved in the inner working of the case.

Another problem that is bound to come up is how do you separate the time restraints? You’ve only got one trial tech, how can they make clips during no examination times? What about at night, who gets those few valuable hours of the Tech’s time? The answer can’t be “bring on another tech” as you can then wave your cost savings away.

There are many reasons not to share a Trial Tech these are just some of them. I’ll stress again, it’s not the best idea if the case has any complexity to it at all. The only time that it would be feasible is if the case is small with not many disagreements nor strategy.