Most jurors get their information from the internet and TV. People just entering our jury pools were born after the invention of the internet, meaning they have never spent a day of their lives without it. A technological presence in the courtroom is now the expected norm. Burn your story into the minds of jurors by enhancing the tale with pictures, not posters, that appear in the format that jurors know from their own living rooms.

If you ask any current college class to define the word “Amazon,” 50% of them will say, “It is an online shopping service.”

Technology: The final frontier
These are the voyages of the litigator, [YOUR NAME HERE]

Your mission:
♦ To explore the strange new worlds of presentation software
♦ To seek out effective ways to tell your client’s story
♦ To boldly go where only attorneys under the age of 30 have gone before

Everyone likes to hear a story, but a story really comes to life when you can see what you hear. Enhance your opening statements and closing arguments with a compelling and memorable visual presentation.

Whether we believe the proverb “a picture is worth a thousand words” originated with an American marketing pioneer [Barnard], or from a Chinese proverb, or if it is a translation of Napoleon’s statement, “A good sketch is better than a long speech”, what we do know is that jurors want an organized story, with pictures, to educate and entertain. Today’s software packages, as scary as they might be to try out, are the most effective ways to blend words and pictures for jurors to experience.

Electronic presentation tools organize, retrieve, and display your exhibits quickly and efficiently. Shuffling through notebooks and foam core boards looks antiquated to jurors. One juror, a 62-year-old bank teller, spoke up in trial during one of these fumblings and said, “Have you ever heard of PowerPoint?”

By pairing software with electronic tools like SmartBoards, you can take an exhibit and enlarge it, underline it, highlight it, write notes on it, and actually print those changes on a new exhibit that jurors may be able to have in their notebooks.