Is Your Presentation too "Slick" for the Jury?
What do I mean when I ask the question, "Is your presentation too "slick" for the Jury"?
Trial presentation software allows a legal team almost unlimited capability as they prepare to present their evidence to a jury. It appears that juries on either the east or west coast are more receptive to presentations that have more sizzle and pop. But if your trial is going to be in the upper Midwest, you might want to consider how much "production value" your presentation has.
I have seen more than one jury respond negatively when a presentation is more about the presentation than it is about the evidence. One simple example might be:
If you are going to show the jury some detail on 10 different pages of evidence, you will have the option of "building" the marked-up evidence in front of the jury or "pretreating" and creating a new view of the page days or weeks before trial.
"Building" the mark-up would mean that you would display the entire page to the jury first, (Understanding that the full page view is for context only, the information is usually not legible). You would then zoom into the region of the page you want to focus on, further emphasis might be provided with highlighting. The jury has been with you each step of the way, watching you progress from a full page view down to the MOST IMPORTANT information on the page. There may be more steps, providing even more focus, or pulling back to a full page view so that you might repeat the process on a different but equally important area of the page.
"Pretreating" your evidence would mean that you would do all of the zooming and marking prior to the time of presentation. When the marked-up version looks just the way you would like, you can save it as a new document. When your team is presenting to the jury, you could go directly to the new version of the page, or start with the original full page view, and then open the marked up view.
Some advantages to this method are:
- There is a less familiarity required with the presentation software tools if you are not building in front of the jury.
- You might save some time if you are not building the evidence during the presentation.
Some disadvantages to this method are:
- The jury might not see the context between the original full page and the new view that instantly appears before them.
- They might see the sudden appearance of the marked-up version as too fast, too easy...too "slick"
This is one very simple example, and none of these observations are universal, every jury responds to the evidence, the presenter, and the presentation differently. The purpose of this paper is to cause you to consider the possibility that if the focus on the evidence is lost on the presentation itself, your hard work might not have the effect you were after.
Next on the docket—Electronic Document Management Offers Superb Investment Returns