If you use it effeciently….

I’m constantly making video clips and I’m constantly telling clients to cut them even shorter. The length of your video playback is such a huge aspect of how much information the jury is going to retain. Think about your own viewing habbits in the comfort of your own home. You normally watch a show YOU WANT to watch. These shows have breaks in the form of commercials which also help keep your interest in the program. Most shows are an hour long with only 45 minutes of programming.

Add all of those factors together and try to come up with a good excuse to playback 2 hours of a video deposition. I’ve heard every excuse in the book but the most common is: “This is a VERY important witness, what they have to say will really sway the case in our favor”.

While that statement can be true, playing back hours of video will NOT help your case, but instead hurt it. I’m looking at a jury sitting in front of me and we’re 1:15 minutes in, and they’re not paying attention. They’re looking around, looking at the walls, and jurour number 3 has actually taken her glasses off. We still have an hour to go…

And since I’ve watched this before, there truly is some great testimony that helps our case in here. But they jury isn’t getting it, and even if they do, they aren’t going to remember.

I will always stand by my belief that you should never play more than 45 minutes of testimony at a time. If the witness is truly that important, subpoena them and have them testify live.. and if that is not possible, ask the judge for a break half way through the testimony or find some other way to break the testimony up.

If not, you probably won’t be getting the “case winning points” to your jury.

In the past we have used YesLaw and were satisfied with the quality of work for the first year, then it went downhill. After a couple embarrassing moments in trial due to poor Q/C we switched Litigation Dynamics to synching all of our clients video’s in-house in order to provide the utmost quality.

Last Thursday I began working with a new client that had all of their video synched online. I was given a hard drive loaded with over 100 hours of video, which was presumed to be synched to 99% accuracy as it states on the synch’ing companies website….

Until we started making clips. We’ve estimated that on average the starting and ending points are around 1 second off. You might be thinking that 1 second is not that big of a gap, but think about how many words you can say in a second.. try “one-Mississippi”. And that’s just the average, sometimes the stamp is right on, sometimes it’s off by 2 seconds or more! It’s very embarrassing when the transcript is showing line 12 when the actual testimony is halfway through line 11.

We’ve spent hours Q/C’ing all of the video, but I’m still nervous that it will be noticeable when we start playing video tomorrow. They might have just been having a bad day when they synch’d these videos (or are had some false advertising and were actually using software based synch and not hand synch), but having a bad day unfortunately isn’t acceptable when the product is showing in a courtroom.

My word of advice is to make sure and choose carefully when you’re looking to have your next video synched!

update:I received an email from John at YesLaw. I will copy/paste the most relevant points.

Should you ever find a YesLaw Synch is off by a second, much less two, we would be happy to redo the entire job.

There is a right way and a wrong way to import synchronized transcripts into both of these programs.
Both methods seem to work, but use the wrong way and the synch will be off by one to two seconds – and gets progressively worse with increasing the number of MPEG files.

We do not use auto-sync software for our manual synch jobs. All jobs are synched and then fully QC’d by another person to ensure no one has a “bad day.”

The highlights of my response were this:

I’m not sure where they got their synch done. I’m almost positive it was NOT completed by YesLaw (or sanctions online synch), as the quality was really not up to par.

I do know that Yes was/has always been very responsive to my requests (when we started using Yes the upload program had just been released and there were many late night calls making sure the files were transferred, and issues being worked out) and out of the hundreds of videos I sent over time were 99 correct.

I do think Yes does offer the best option in hand synch’ing, since I’ve yet to see a computer synch that actually was accurate (especially here in south texas where there are heavy Hispanic and Texas accents, not even mentioning depos with a translator).

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I guess I should have mentioned in my original post that I have had a very good experience with YesLaw in the past. Although I did have problems with some videos in the past, it appears that they are very aware and concerned with Q/C and know that their quality directly reflects upon the person using their product.

With the new knowledge that all of their video is sync’d by hand, with a seperate person Q/C’ing the work, it does convince me to give them another try.

Tests after tests show this, the slowly, but surely market gains are also proof. Not to mention.. Have you seen the resale prices on Macs? I was trying to find a cheap, lightly used MacBook and it’s near impossible to find a 6 month old model for more than $300 off the new price!

So here’s the latest read from Popular Mechanics that compares Macs to PCs, both laptops and desktops. Can you guess who comes out on top?

Article Found Here

While charts and graphs are normally confusing when I view them myself, I wanted to keep it simple. But, as you can see this case presented with a lot of information. I was forced to use one slide as it was for print AND electronic format. My only design requirement was to use the totality of the information on one slide.

Click Here to see what the final presentation looks like!


Disclaimer: Keynote video quality has been reduced due to compression. All facts (including names, numbers, labels) have been changed.

Garr has written a great article comparing eloquent speeches compared with a poorly designed PowerPoint. Since an opening statement or closing argument is a lawyers’ speech, this should apply to our field seamlessly.

I highly suggest checking this post out!

Included colors in the zip file:

All the textboxes are sized around 800×600 and can be resized in PowerPoint or Keynote. They are also around 80% opaque, so that some background shows through.

Download Here

Please feel free to contact me if you have any custom PowerPoint or Keynote design needs!

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What I’m really trying to say is: Since there are no holidays around, we’re busy, 1 week arbitration last week, along with 3 mediations. Two week long trials start tomorrow, and working on 2 mediations. Needless to say, I haven’t had time to create any tutorials!

I’ve created some generic enough graphics over the past couple of weeks that can be used in your own presentations, and I’ll get those posted throughout the week.

I also want to thank Brett Burney of ediscoveryinfo for the great Guest Posts he wrote for the Macs In Trial seminar. I was annoyed that I could not attend and he helped relieve some of the tension!

• Notebook Interactive Viewer from Smart Technologies - Kern Lewis offered this free download (Mac, Windows, & Linux versions) as a way to view content and presentations created in the full version of Smart Technologies’ Notebook Software or the SMART Board interactive whiteboards themselves.
• Timelines on a Mac - One attendee recommended the $40 Bee Docs’ Timeline to create nice drop-down events. Someone else mentioned that Bee Docs is a “little sparse” in its features, so they recommended the $24.95 TimeFlyer 2.1 from A Single Pixel that will let you do vertical timelines when necessary. Both of these applications are specifically for the Mac and appear to compete with TimeMap and TimelineXpress.
• Record Streaming Video from the Web - Kern Lewis suggested using Videobox from TastyApps when you need to record/download streaming video from the Web into QuickTime format. Since Videobox may miss a video or two, someone else suggested a Safari plugin called CosmoPod from Cocoamug Software. CosmoPod “lounges in Safari’s address bar and activates whenever a video is detected on the website you’re on.” I’ve used TubeSock successfully in the past to download YouTube videos.
• Task Management - GTD was a popular method among attendees for keeping track of tasks and to-dos, and one attendee came up to the front and demonstrated how he uses OmniFocus to manage his day.
• Document Assembly - Several folks were curious what others were using for generating standard documents. One person offered LawStream Pro (see the “magic mix“) but continued that it’s a bit difficult to master. Probably the best option available for the Mac is MacSimple Prompter from Wordsite Office Automation.
• Online Practice Management - Last, Ben Stevens got up to introduce the group to Rocket Matter, which is a new and completely online practice management service. Instead of using something like Daylite that gets installed on your machine, Rocket Matter requires no installation because it is accessed through the Web.

This is the last of my posts from the “Using Macs in Trial II” seminar. The presentations were all very interesting and the networking was fantastic. Attendees were constantly swapping stories and Mac tips. The Mac-using legal community is strong and active.

Much thanks to Kern Lewis and the Foreman, Lewis & Hutchison team for hosting the shindig. They did a terrific job and everyone I spoke with planned to return for next year’s conference.

I also want to thank Blake Boyd for letting me guest blog this past week since he was not able to attend.

Guest post by Brett Burney.

When they were done re-enacting the scenes from a tragic death of a client in police custody, Rafe Foreman turned to the audience and allowed us to shout out questions we had after watching the re-enactment. Kern Lewis listed the questions as they were blurted out, and then we all went through a few of the questions suggesting appropriate images to use on Keynote slides to tell the story. Kern explained that this approach is outlined in Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points book (now updated for PowerPoint 2007).

I’ve heard Cliff speak before and he tells a fascinating story of helping attorney Mark Lanier tell the plaintiff’s story in the Vioxx litigation.

Then John Callis of Clarity Legal Software took the seat at the head of the class. Unfortunately, I did not have much previous experience with Clarity products, but I had heard so many great things about John and his group, that I was really looking forward to hearing him speak.

I was impressed that John was one of only two full-time employees at Clarity, and John is himself the chief software developer. This was significant because I saw him take notes for future features as the audience gave him feedback and asked questions.

John is gracious and sincere, thanking many of his customers in the audience and honestly answering all the questions that were thrown at him (and there were a lot). John was only there for a few hours because he had to get back to a trial he was supporting himself down in South Texas.

John explained that Clarity started in 2006 as a Mac-based company, but they now develop for Windows and Linux in addition to the Mac. Their two main products are DepoSmart (transcript manager) and TrialSmart (trial presentation).

John first went through DepoSmart which can import a wide variety of transcript formats from ASCII to LiveNote to Summation. DepoSmart also accepts a wide variety of video files and allows you synchronize the text and video yourself if you so choose (Clarity will do it for you as well).

DepoSmart will also easily import text and video that is already synchronized. For example, a court reporter or co-counsel can send you a transcript and video that had been synchronized in Trial Director or Sanction, and DepoSmart will accept that just fine.

A question came up regarding RealLegal’s E-Transcript file format which usually gets delivered to attorneys from court reporters in .PTX format. While DepoSmart cannot accept the proprietary .PTX format, it’s a simple task to download the free E-Transcript Viewer from RealLegal that will allow you to view the nicely formatted .PTX file, or convert it to a .TXT file (which will import easily into DepoSmart). The only problem is that on the Mac side, RealLegal only supports “Mac Classic Mode” which pre-dates the Intel switch. Since most Macs in use today run on the Intel processor, some suggested using Parallels or VMware Fusion to run Windows and use the free E-Transcript Viewer to convert the .PTX file to .TXT. But instead of firing up a full virtual machine, someone recommended just using CrossOver Mac instead. This will run the Windows version of the E-Transcript Viewer just fine without requiring a full, virtual Windows environment. I tried this and it worked flawlessly.

Next, John Callis gave a demo on TrialSmart, which has become a simpler, but very viable, alternative to Sanction or Trial Director. John honestly admits that TrialSmart is not going to give you all the bells and whistles that you’ll find in those two competitors, but if all you need is an easy-to-understand and stable trial presentation application with basic features, then TrialSmart could be your best option. And if you’re looking for a native-Mac trial application, it is the ONLY option. Clarity Legal Software is one of the few software companies that are truly focused on the Mac-using legal market (as evidenced by their name).

A few features in TrialSmart that got me and the crowd excited were 1) the ability to move documents around on the screen once you pull them up in presentation mode; 2) the ability to re-size video and documents in presentation mode; and 3) an “image preview” window that can live on your primary monitor so you can see what you’ll be showing on your secondary monitor (the projector in the court room). Clarity provides several excellent video tutorials and list of features on their site.

I was extremely impressed with John and his products and I plan to incorporate them into my own repertoire very soon. Even more important, it was evident that John was focused on giving the Mac legal community some functional software, and reacts to support requests as quickly as possible.

Guest post by Brett Burney.