Technology

Microsoft Finally Admits that PowerPoint Might Not Be The Best

PowerPoint is pretty much the worst thing ever. Don't use it. Expand your horizons of creativity, lawyers.

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For decades, PowerPoint has been the vehicle that has allowed people to whip up presentations with little or no forethought. It has allowed people to forget about how to say something and what to say and instead focus on trying to wow audiences with swirling text animations. In short, it’s pretty much the worst thing ever. A few months ago, Microsoft announced a new presentation tool that it is adding to the Microsoft Office suite called Sway.

Here is a blurb from the announcement page:

You want your ideas to be understood. Sway helps you do just that. It’s a new way for you to create a beautiful, interactive, web-based expression of your ideas, from your phone or browser. It is easy to share your creation and it looks great on any screen. Your ideas have no borders, edges, page breaks, cells or slides.

Let me just back up a little bit and talk about two things: 1) why PowerPoint is bad (and other methods are good), and 2) why you should care as a lawyer.

Linear Presentations Are Not Conducive to Learning and Retention

First off, PowerPoint is a linear presentation tool. That means that all of your slides and bullet points and clip arts are stacked in a certain order. The more information you have in your presentation, the harder it is for the brain to connect the dots to global concepts in earlier slides. Imagine you have an outline of information. Here is how it would look in a linear presentation:

Here’s how it would look in a nonlinear presentation:

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Nonlinear presentations allow the brain to group ideas and concepts together. It also allows more control over the flow of the information by allowing you to change your presentation on the fly to make it suit your audience or your witness.

Generally, I’ve found that when people can see where the presentation is going and get a global picture, they can retain more, whereas in a linear presentation, the audience has no clue how many slides are left and have a hard time budgeting their attention span.

Why Lawyers Should Care

Lawyers should care because the judges care and the jury cares. The Manual for Complex Litigation is published by the Federal Judicial Center (a government agency) and sets forth certain recommendations for how judges should manage mass torts/complex litigation cases. The bulk of the section on how exhibits should be presented at trial talks about how attorneys should be encouraged to do so digitally.

Here’s a quote:

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Such systems display evidence electronically and simultaneously to everyone in the courtroom and may significantly assist jury involvement and comprehension and expedite trial.

Regarding jurors, even using a mediocre tool like PowerPoint has shown to help tremendously. A study was published in Applied Cognitive Psychology in 2012 that showed several versions of a mock trial to jurors. There were versions where one side used PowerPoint, both sides did, and neither side did. The study found that using computers drastically affected the retention of information, the assignment of liability, and perception of the attorneys who did or did not use computers for evidence presentation:

The percentage of participants who found the defendant liable was the highest (48%) when the plaintiffs used visuals but the defendant did not, and the lowest (26%) when the plaintiffs did not use visuals but the defendant did.

So, judges like it, and jurors will like you and vote for your client more often if you use it.

How Sway is Different (Better) than PowerPoint

First off, I should mention that right now, Sway is in beta mode (you can request an invite here) and the number of templates that are available is limited, but you can still do some pretty neat things. Imagine your PowerPoint slides and exhibits printed out and laid out across a conference room table. You cluster by concepts or by witnesses or by causes of action. Instead of trying to figure out how you are going to stack this up in a PowerPoint, you just decide to present it like you have it organized on your table. Here is my favorite Sway. It takes us to a panel of state flags like a Jeopardy board. You click on one flag and information about that state pops up. Here’s the link.

Here’s another nice one. When you scroll about a third of the way through, there’s a stack of photos right above where it says “Environmental Stewardship.” When you click on that stack, it cycles through the photos as a kind of embedded slide show within the presentation. Here’s the link.

Conclusion

There are definitely some presentations where a linear presentation works best, but lawyers should always be looking to expand their horizons of creativity. You don’t need to be gimmicky. Just because you have a tool that lets you do fancy zooming and panning, does not mean that you should use all of your flashy presentation tools every time just to be different. Sway might not be the right solution for every closing argument or every cross examination, but it’s nice to have options. It’s also nice to see some fresh ideas to expand creative ways to explain difficult concepts.

Jeff Bennion is a solo practitioner from San Diego. When not handling his own cases, he’s consulting lawyers on how to use technology to not be boring in trial or managing e-discovery projects in mass torts/complex litigation cases. If you want to be disappointed in a lack of posts, you can follow him on Twitter or on Facebook. If you have any ideas of things you want him to cover, email Jeff at jeff@trial.technology.

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