News, views and tips on litigation graphics, trial strategy and the law.

Why You Should Join the Growing Number of Attorneys Using iPads

July 24, 2023 by 7 Comments

I’ve been giving a number of presentations at law firms on the use of iPads for attorneys, with a focus on new apps for the courtroom and mediation. I generally start the presentation by asking how many attorneys own an iPad, with about one-third saying they do. Of that group, many say it’s mostly used by their kids for games, and they have not really started using it much for work. Part of the issue, say the attorneys, is that the IT people in their offices say either that an iPad cannot be supported by their network, or more simply (and perhaps honestly) that the IT people don’t really know how to support the iPad.

With this background, I found the comprehensive study released by the ABA on attorneys’ use of technology very interesting. Kevin O’Keefe summarized the study done by Jeff Richardson as follows:

  • In 2012, 33% of all attorneys report using a tablet for law-related tasks (more than double the 15% in 2011)
  • 91% of the 33%, or 30% of all attorneys, are using an iPad [Read more...]

Keynote for Attorneys: Tips to Try This Alternative to PowerPoint for Case Presentation

July 14, 2023 by 5 Comments

I just finished reading Walter Isaacson’s remarkable biography of Steve Jobs, which I highly recommend. It’s a great read, and it inspired me to develop this post on how to use Keynote for Macs. Keynote is a program that Steve Jobs demanded his team create for his product unveilings because he was so frustrated with Microsoft’s PowerPoint, which he found useless and would never use.

In my mind, there is simply no question that Keynote is a superior product for many reasons, including: (1) it’s a Mac program, so it’s well integrated with all aspects of the Mac laptops and iPad; (2) it embeds videos in the file itself, unlike PowerPoint, which “links” the videos to the main file—and these links can and do get lost when the file is being copied, often during the stress of trial; (3) Keynote also accepts as video any format that your QuickTime player supports such as MP4 videos, which are better quality than Windows Media; and (4) Keynote also supports very high resolution and much better drawing tools, as well as standard template background designs.

To encourage attorneys to give it a try as an alternative to PowerPoint for presenting your case, I asked Cogent Legal’s associate designer, Anna Reeser, to write the following Keynote tips and tricks. You can purchase the Keynote App for $19.99 from the Apple App Store if you do not already have it. To get started, view a Keynote tutorial on the Apple website, and then try the following steps to create a powerful presentation.

The Beauty of Data: How to Use Adobe Illustrator with Excel to Show Complex Data for Litigation

July 5, 2023 by Leave a Comment

Most people don’t find data beautiful, but it really can be. I am definitely not talking about Excel sheets with endless pages of numbers, but rather about data that is visualized in an appealing manner, which actually can be an exciting and powerful work of art. Complex data, when arranged in understandable ways, can reveal patterns that simply cannot be known and understood until you see them.

In a recent case, Cogent Legal was hired to create the visuals for a highway defect case that involved a large amount of accident history data for a one-mile section of road (over 600 accidents of various types over five years). When I heard that the state produced the data in an Excel format (rather than paper form), I was excited because I knew what could be done with such data.

Adobe Illustrator has a feature that allows data from an Excel sheet to be imported directly into Illustrator and placed on an X and Y axis. Illustrator then takes this data and correctly plots it directly from the sheet. You may well be asking why this is so special since Excel and similar spreadsheet programs can create their own charts with the touch of a button. The answer is that once the data is imported into Illustrator, the possibilities for endless creativity and visualization start. [Read more...]