How To Present Beautiful Evidence

PowerPoint is an enabler of bad presentations everywhere.

presentationBut I was told that people are visual learners, so I should use PowerPoint to be more persuasive… – All the litigators

Half of that statement is true. People are visual learners, but to say that PowerPoint is the cure is like saying ocean water is the cure for dehydration. As I mentioned a few weeks ago in my article about how lawyers can be more persuasive, PowerPoint is not inherently bad. It’s the way it is used and overused that makes the presentations bad. It is no more the culprit than Microsoft Word is responsible for bad brief writing. PowerPoint is an enabler though.

As litigators, we face a tough problem. We often have to educate the jury about very complex concepts in a persuasive and memorable way. A medical malpractice trial or a patent infringement trial can hinge on how well you explain these complicated concepts to people who are being paid $15 a day to deal with your client’s problems. And to make it worse, we can’t stop the trial to take a Q&A from the jury. In fact, we can’t even say hi to them in the elevators. So, a lot of the members of the litigator community have concluded that we overcome these incredible hurdles by being visual teachers. And by creating bullet point lists with animated text and stock image photos of gavels and the scales of justice and presenting 200 slides at a time in opening or closing.

Litigators do need to recognize that there are hurdles in the way we present evidence to our audience. Litigators also need to recognize that we can be more effective communicators by incorporating visual elements into our evidence presentations. Most importantly, litigators need to understand that you do not solve this problem by opening up PowerPoint and spending 25 minutes putting together a slide show.

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Edward Tufte is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science at Yale University. He teaches how to turn complex information into something simple. He’s written four books on presenting data: Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations, and Beautiful Evidence (affiliate links). He also puts on full-day seminars on data presentation. I attended one of his seminars yesterday and had the pleasure of sitting down with him for about an hour afterwards to discuss the applicability of his teachings to the legal field.

Killing the Bullet Point

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Tufte pointed out that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has banned PowerPoint presentations at Amazon. In an interoffice memo, Bezos said:

Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the innerconnectedness of ideas.

Even Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, the same Microsoft that makes PowerPoint, banned PowerPoint presentations because they are boring. In an interview with the New York Times, he called long PowerPoint presentations “the long winding road.” In discussing how he wanted to run meetings, he had the following to say about PowerPoint slide decks:

I don’t think it’s productive. I don’t think it’s efficient. I get impatient. So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: “I’ve got the following four questions. Please don’t present the deck.” That lets us go, whether they’ve organized it that way or not, to the recommendation. And if I have questions about the long and winding road and the data and the supporting evidence, I can ask them. But it gives us greater focus.

Not a direct indictment of PowerPoint, since not all PowerPoints have to be long and winding, but certainly applicable to 99% of the openings and closings I have seen in PowerPoint.

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Don’t Assume Your Audience is Dumb

I have to really break it down for these idiots or else they won’t understand my case…

The problem with PowerPoint is that it is convenient for the speaker, but hostile towards the content of the presentation. Part of the misconception that a lot of lawyers have is that we have to reduce everything to bullet points or the idiots on the jury won’t get it. Imagine if that were true:

oj ppt

The bottom line is that PowerPoint is a crutch for us to put a prompt on the screen for us to talk about so that we can rehearse less.

People today consume more information before breakfast than most people consumed in their whole day 10 years ago. If you start your presentation with contempt for the audience and assume that they need things dumbed down for them, it will come through. Don’t assume your audience is dumb, but because they are used to getting information in optimized forms, be it in infographics in the New York Times, or weather reports that summarize thousands of data points in ways we can ingest in seconds, feel free to assume that they have low tolerance for bad data presentations.

The fact is we are capable of ingesting mass amounts of data in graphics that are designed properly. Look at a typical Google maps screen, one of the most used data graphics in history:

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There is information conveyed with various shades of colors, fine print words, and icons that upload into our brains vast amounts of information quickly and concisely. Do you think the color choice, font choice, font size, and icon choice are the result of deliberate planning and studies? If this were a PowerPoint slide presentation, it would be about 200+ slides that would cause us to get lost and mentally wander. Instead, we see it on the screen and focus on the points we need and ingest the information and the relationship to other information in the graphic much better and much faster than we could if it were a PowerPoint.

So How Do You Use PowerPoint?

I use PowerPoint all the time in litigation. It’s a great tool, as long as you don’t ever run it in presentation mode. PowerPoint makes it easy to outline ideas and then move slides around. When I am working on an opening statement or even themes in my case, I’ll outline them in PowerPoint with one concept per slide. Then, when I am getting ready to put my final draft together, I use my PowerPoint slide deck as an outline after I have arranged my notes and idea groups into clusters and put them in the right order. If I need to show documents or photos, I do it in a more robust program like TrialDirector. You tell a story, you use technology, you keep the focus on the story and not the delivery medium, and you use PowerPoint (just not in court). Everyone’s happy.


Jeff Bennion is Of Counsel at Estey & Bomberger LLP, a plaintiffs’ law firm specializing in mass torts and catastrophic injuries. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of San Diego’s plaintiffs’ trial lawyers association, Consumer Attorneys of San Diego. He is also the Education Chair and Executive Committee member of the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section. He is a member of the Advisory Council and instructor at UCSD’s Litigation Technology Management program. His opinions are his own. Follow him on Twitterhere or on Facebook here, or contact him by email at jeff@trial.technology.

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