Spoiler alert, America’s #1

With a hat tip to our colleague Kurt for bringing this one to our attention, you should definitely check out this info graphic by eLocalLawyers.com. There was some debate around the shop on the aesthetics of the info graphic and whether it was truly a great one because of the lack of polish. Surely we’ve seen slicker ones before, but there’s little doubt they nailed the “info” part. They’ve got some really interesting facts about our sue-happy country in there. Spoiler alert, America’s #1. USA!  USA!

Let us know what you think.

I can't read your mind yet, but I CAN hear your simple words.

Ever worry that as a trial lawyer, having someone run your presentation could trip you up and make you look unprepared?

I hope so, because you should, because they can.

Imagine the most important cross exam of the trial and the other team has zagged after you prepped for a zig.  No big deal, you know where to go with it, but does the tech in the hotseat know?  Probably not, because you’re pulling pages from a 1500 page document that has three page sixty-five’s and a confusing string of Bates numbers.

Here’s an iron-clad list of steps to significantly cut down the chance of getting out of synch and frustrated.

1.  Ask the tech to create PDF’s of your trial exhibits with the exhibit and page number on each page.
2.  Print from these PDF’s when you’re creating notebooks for court, and use the page references in your outlines.

Okay, seems like that’s the entire list.

My point is, it’s very simple and there’s nothing high-tech or groundbreaking about it.  You just need to make sure it’s done so you can confidently say “let’s look at page 290 of exhibit 57″ as opposed to “let’s look at section twelve of the attachment to the exhibit, it’s about 300 pages in” and get the right thing on screen within seconds.

Bianca Howard, a PhD student in mechanical engineering at Columbia University, used publicly available information to map out annual building energy consumption for New York City.

She displays it in HTML to reach a wider audience (iDevice users, no doubt), but I believe using Flash would have created a smoother user experience. Nonetheless, it’s well executed and easy to to use.

Click above if you want follow along real time

As I sit here in front of my television, geeked out for the SOTU (that’s State of the Union to you Washington outsiders), I’ve got my laptop in front of me. I’ll be watching the “enhanced version” provided by the White House that will supplement the president’s speech with graphics and charts. I figured I’d live blog it for the rest of you Political and Design geeks out there.

I constantly preach to my clients to borrow ideas from everyday life. I have a feeling this enhanced version will have more than enough ideas to borrow for Openings, Closings and expert’s presentations.

No matter your political view of President Obama, you have to admit the Obama campaign (and administration) have “branding” down. The logo, graphics, and campaign materials all carry a unified look. There’s no mistaking it in this world where visual communication is key to getting your message across.

So, let’s sit back and see what we can learn from the POTUS’ (President of the United States’) enhanced view and find out if there’s any inspiration we can carry over to the court room. (Click on the image below to advance)

More often than not, you’ll see team members retreating back to their rooms to relax – when time allows – to watch a movie on their iPad. It’s the only reason I’ve kept my Netflix subscription. It looks like I’m missing out though.

Nathan Yau created a chart showing where you can find the top 100 films streaming online. This chart was enough to make me realize I need to cut Netflix after I hit the “post” button.  The chart itself might not be incredibly sexy, but it’s pretty darn effective and worth a look.

All I can decipher from Google’s creation is that there seems to be some ground swell of people (over 3MM now) yelling at a computer. Without being able to make out the words, you might think there are now 3MM senior citizens mad that they can not find where they saved a document on their old desktop and are asking Congress for help (presumably from the other room).

So what can you take away from this poorly executed graphic? Keep the information legible when trying to convince others to join your cause (like maybe a jury?). If they can’t read it, why should they pay any attention to it in the first place?

In all fairness, you can download the infographic and zoom in quite a bit to make out the text. Which is good, because even in Google docs – their own product – it’s completely unreadable. If you took the time to download it, you could see all the people speaking out against SOPA, which Google describes as:

Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, are meant to stop online piracy but would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American businesses. Experts agree that there are better ways to shut down pirate websites than asking US companies to censor the Web. Join the groundswell of experts, organizations and people from all parts of America united in their opposition to SOPA and PIPA. Tell Congress not to censor the Web and not to cripple our innovation economy.

def: Huge Trial Paradox. Once your volume of video depositions and designations reaches a tipping point, there is not enough time to finish them before trial.  Simple changes in process help your tech consultant enter 500 witness’ video cuts faster than they could “normally” do 5.  Even though workload scales with volume to a certain point, once you get there it drops drastically.

So what’s the “normal way” a lawyer would give dep designations to a techie?  Even with all of the transcript management software available, designations are generally typed into a table in Word, scanned to PDF or sent as a marked up transcript.

In order to get the page/lines into their presentation software for reports and playback, techs need to do at least some, if not a lot, of  reformatting to get it into a friendly text file their program can understand.  That’s Bottleneck Number One, reformatting the page/lines.

Bottleneck Number Two is fine tuning the beginning and end of each designation to play.  If your trial is “big” enough, you’ll have dozens of witnesses, all of whom are designated by both sides, each with a hours of run-time.  Removing the choppy edits between cuts is an unavoidable manual process that takes a lot of time, so you’re in for a good deal of waiting and a sizable addition to the invoice if you want them all in final form prior to trial.

So how does the paradox work?  How do you slice off those bottlenecks to deal with 500 faster than 5?

It's actually easier than this, but not as cool.

Removing Bottleneck One (reformatting page/lines to enter into the presentation system):  Have a conversation about what sort of formatting your tech needs to import into the system without having to change anything.  If it takes 10 minutes or longer (in the case of highlighted transcripts) to do a single witness, your tech can batch import 500 at once in the same amount of time it takes to deal with a single hand highlighted transcript.

Removing Bottleneck Two (fine tuning the ends of each designation to eliminate choppy cuts):  Agree to review the text reports only, or to watch rough cuts of the video prior to trial.  Since it’s unlikely that all of the originally designated portions will play in court, you’ll potentially eliminate hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars off of your client’s invoice by doing very little differently, then holding off on finalizing anything to play until you’re pretty sure it actually will play in court.

Type page/lines a certain way and don’t finalize hundreds of hours of video that won’t play, simple as that.  Best part is, you don’t need a Huge Trial to do it, you get to decide what your tipping point is.

So, do you go against the grain of your state? Share this link on Facebook (below) and let us know.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall during jury deliberations after they’ve seen my graphics.  Is that “fly on the wall” line cliché enough for you? How about if I told you I had an idea and illustrated it with a light bulb over my head like every cartoon ever shown in the afternoon on my parents’ cabinet television?  Well much to my surprise, that very image worked for a jury on a recent trial with a multi-billion dollar exposure.

Luckily for the fly part of my brain, the trial team interviewed jurors after the big verdict. So I wondered:  were they engaged by the design choices?  Did the interactive timeline help them organize the facts?  Did the fancy animation sell them on our defense theme we’d been driving for months in court?  Maybe, but that’s not what they found remarkable.

See what they did after the jump.

During trial, Plaintiffs called an expert with zero credible testimony regarding her damages calculation. According to her, the made-up formula appeared overnight like a brilliant epiphany or Oprah “ah-ha” moment.  Only the jury didn’t see her idea as ground-breaking or sensible. They described it as “insulting,” “dishonest,” and “shrouded and clouded in hocus-pocus.” According to several jurors, they resented the lawyers for assuming they’d buy it. And they admitted it was a turning point in their decision to lean toward our side of the case.

This lack of credibility that bordered on absurdity wasn’t lost on our trial team either, so naturally we decided to mock it in closing argument. We used a picture of the witness and a simply illustrated light bulb above her head. The bulb lit up to the sound of a choir singing “aaaaaahaaaaaaaa”.  No, I’m not joking, we went with full-on sound effects.

Based on the interviews, the jury applauded this concept and specifically mentioned our cliché and sort-of-silly slide because it validated their opinion.  They further explained that they felt Plaintiffs insulted their intelligence while the defense respected them and made a key connection with humor.

So I have a light bulb over my head right now, the writing is on the wall, and I’m thinking about this pearl of wisdom: sometimes, the simplest visual can be the most successful one if it makes that critical connection with the jury. Validating what the jury is already thinking, regardless of how cliché or pedestrian it may seem in the eyes of a “creative type” can make a world of difference. Oh, and you can’t have too much of a good thing!