Technology In Trial (Part 2): How To Do Openings And Closings
How do you teach visually and avoid the negative aspects that are associated with PowerPoint to create a persuasive opening/witness exam/closing?
Virtually all of the studies on learning will tell you that people are visual learners and can better recall information if they learned it in some visual way as opposed to just listening to someone explain it. Likewise, there are a lot of studies that show that PowerPoint is a horrible way to teach (see my previous article about that here).
So, how do you teach visually and avoid the negative aspects that are associated with PowerPoint to create a persuasive opening/witness exam/closing?
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The answer is thinking outside the box.
I know why attorneys do PowerPoint openings and it has nothing to do with trying to be the best presenter they can be. They do it for themselves. When you are in trial, you are trying to multitask with remembering all of your points for opening, who the first witness is going to be, being mindful of objections, etc. So, it makes sense to outsource a lot of your stress by putting your opening statement into bullet points (and the occasional clip art and stock photos of a gavel) and pre-sorting them into the order you want to use, so that you can get up there and click a button a bunch of times and walk through your opening without having to worry about going astray or forgetting something.
Your Notes
Here’s another excerpt from the interview with Josh Karton and David Ball that I cited to in my previous article about PowerPoint:
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They love [PowerPoint], because it means they don’t need notes. They just put the next thing up on the screen, they look at the screen and then they know what to talk about next. What I suggest is they put the whole PowerPoint series on a notebook which is, a notebook computer which they can see and the jury cannot and simply program it so they can glance down and see the next topic and then not show it to the jury until after they’ve explained that new point, not before. So the points only up for a moment and they see it and then you go onto your next topic. That’s okay, but this thing of putting, “okay, now we’re going to talk about demographics in Boston.” So they sit there staring at that label barely listening to the attorney, barely paying attention to the attorney. If you ask them later what they were listening to, they say, I don’t know, something about Boston.
So, over-reliance on a digital presentation is a poor way to persuade, but you can still organize your presentation digitally and be organized if you use it as a kind of digital teleprompter.
Logistically, here are a couple of different ways you can do it:
- By yourself: Set up an iPad or a tablet on the lectern and use a clicker to advance the slides, using them as notes to you, not as a presentation for the jury. I know that you can put presenter’s notes in PowerPoint and present in the mode that lets you see the notes, but not your audience, but to use that feature, you have to be up close to your notes. The whole point of doing this is to get your nose out of your notes, get away from behind the lectern, free yourself from a bullet-point presentation, and be able to stand main stage and tell a persuasive story, but with the help of a digital outline.
- With a helper: Get a USB-powered monitor and place it off to the side on the lectern or on counsel table. USB-powered monitors cost from $100 to $200 and act like external monitors, but get power and video signal via one USB cable. As you are giving your opening or closing, your helper is advancing the slides for you and you can glance down occasionally to see where you are at and what your next line is going to be. You don’t have a clicker. It’s just you telling a story in front of the jury with your notes to the side. The main advantage of having a helper is they can also help feed you other notes.
Having a shared screen with your second chair can be particularly helpful during jury selection. Imagine the following: One attorney is questioning jurors with a lectern off to the side with a screen that only the questioning attorney can see. The second chair attorney circles chair number 8 and writes on the screen in big red text: “Mr. Smith, school teacher, got into car accident 15 years ago and hurt his back.” The questioning attorney can do the entire voir dire without stopping to take any notes and come off like he or she has a photographic memory. The same goes for examining witnesses. If a witness says something wrong, you could frantically scribble a note on a post-it and sneak up to the attorney and hand him the note, or you could just put up exhibit 18, page 3 on the shared screen and write a note saying “He just impeached himself with this exhibit” or “you forgot to move that last exhibit into evidence” or anything else that you need to communicate.
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What the Jury Sees
I also advocate having a laptop hooked up to the projector to use to display and zoom in on exhibits. That way your digital display to the jury is limited to what they need to see, and not cluttered with your speaker notes. So you put up your exhibit 3 and talk about why it’s important while the document is still on the screen, instead of showing the exhibit, then going to an animated bullet-point list of all of the important things about that document. That’s visual clutter. It detracts from learning and it makes you boring.
If you’re wondering if that’s a lot of computers/things to have on your table, it’s not. Having two laptops and a USB-powered screen is a lot better than having a fort of 3″ binders and yellow pads and post-its.
Earlier: Technology In Trial (Part 1): How To Excel With Excel
How To Be Persuasive – A Guide For Lawyers
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.
