An upgrade to Windows 10 worked well. Trial Director and Sanction work fine, and the improvements to the Windows interface are appreciated.

Judge Grewal spoke of the importance of early and good graphics to help a court understand a patent case.

Free webinar on PowerPoint Skills for Litigators: Animation, Video & Hyperlinks on Thursday, December 11, 2023 at noon Pacific. Join me in this free webinar and learn how to: Embed a [...]

Vector graphics allow you to expand and zoom in on details without pixelation and loss of clarity. This post has a video demonstration of a new free iPhone app, Adobe Shape, which makes it very [...]

This blog post uses video of a mock deposition and motion argument to review lessons including start thinking about your visual trial presentation before you take depositions; think of visual [...]

This post discusses how to avoid the problem of ugly pixelated blow-ups and projections by having images redrawn with vector graphics. Vector graphics like those used in Adobe Illustrator will [...]

  Free Recording Available: PowerPoint Skills for the Litigator: Templates, Timelines and Tools Our webinar on PowerPoint Skills for Litigators last week had great attendance and [...]

At Cogent Legal, we often help litigators with PowerPoint, and now we plan to share some of our PowerPoint secrets for litigators in a free webinar. The webinar will be held on Wednesday, October [...]

At Cogent Legal, we often help litigators with PowerPoint, and now we plan to share some of our PowerPoint secrets for litigators in a free webinar. The webinar will be held on Wednesday, October [...]

Well-presented photographs are powerful tools for litigators. In this post, I'll share some samples that show how we've helped litigators use photographs in court, along with a number of tips for [...]

The Recorder has recognized Cogent Legal as “Best Courtroom Presentation Provider” in its 2014 Annual Survey. This is the second year in a row that Cogent received the honor.

Numbers, and the interpretation of numbers, play a big role in litigation. Presenting numerical data in court often requires a good graph of the numbers to show changes and trends in the numbers. [...]

Many attorneys make limited use of technology. As a paralegal friend recently lamented to me, "the most advanced organizational technology many attorneys use is a binder.” With remote screen [...]

In the 6-3 ABC v. Aereo decision, the Supreme Court made a mess of copyright law and sowed uncertainty for technology companies by trying to plug a loophole. As Justice Scalia put it in his [...]

This post provides an annotated "e-brief" style hyperlinked copy of annotations on the Supreme Court decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank. In the decision, the Court held that the claims were not [...]

I recommend Dragon voice recognition software for attorneys because it is so useful and so inexpensive ($101.03 today on Amazon for Premium version 12 for Windows). This blog post how I use [...]

Civil jurors in a Los Angeles court are using special iPads to review admitted trial exhibits during the trial. As I observed in a KPCC interview about iPads in court, I expect to see more iPads [...]

At the 2014 annual meeting of the San Francisco Intellectual Property Law Association, SFIPLA, a panel of judges shared their experiences and reflections on what works and what doesn't work in a [...]

To master the presentation of numbers, attorneys should learn some basic skills in Microsoft Excel, the computer program most often used in business for calculations. Numerical evidence in [...]

This post tells the story of quick turn-around graphics used in copyright litigation.

In my work at Cogent Legal, I have the opportunity to help attorneys develop their presentations and to create visuals that will help inform and persuade. In this post, I'll share some insights [...]

Tips for managing electronic data in litigation effectively, including capturing fields from email or other electronic source, and using those fields in privilege logs.

When you copy text from a scanned Acrobat PDF, it often comes with hard returns. This post shows how to remove the hard returns using Microsoft Word.

Three important lessons for visual aids: (1) Tie animations or other visual aids tightly to the evidence in the case; (2) Use simple visual aids to help jurors understand and track the evidence; [...]

Going to trial requires planning and attention to detail. Jurors may not see the details of your plan, but they will appreciate attorneys who move quickly in trial and show respect for the [...]

A GIF illustrating the story of an email as it goes through litigation.

Cogent Legal offers webinars and live presentations about graphics and technology for litigation. This post announces webinars about case management databases and iPads for trial presentation.

At Cogent, we often work with experts and trial counsel to prepare graphics illustrating and explaining expert opinions. Thus, a new Ninth Circuit decision about the scope of expert discovery in [...]

A central case database where litigators track issues, witnesses, events, documents, to-do items and more is a vital tool for making e-discovery and litigation more efficient. While [...]

Litigation would be much easier if you could work on just one case at a time, and if each case moved quickly to a conclusion. Unfortunately, litigators don't have that luxury. Litigators need to [...]

Using examples adapted from a real case, this post discusses alternatives to present months of data about an employee's habitual tardiness that led to termination.

Legal visuals work. We thought so, and now we have the statistical rigor of a controlled experiment to prove it. In a study comparing opening arguments delivered with and without simple [...]

Professor Edward Tufte, the guru of information graphic design, advises his students to study the design of popular websites to learn techniques for conveying information quickly and efficiently. [...]

This post provides an annotated version of the Apple v. Samsung iPhone patent decision. These annotations are like those we use in an e-brief / ebrief. The post provides a video showing how to do [...]

In closing argument, it can be effective to show the jury the verdict form and tell them how you hope they fill it out. This technique is particularly important when the jury will face a [...]

In oral argument, a litigator has very limited time—she needs to hit the high points and move on. She must communicate enough information to convince the judge or jury of her argument, yet must [...]

We recommend to our readers a recent New Yorker article by Gareth Cook entitled Why Abraham Lincoln Loved Infographics. Cook’s New Yorker article discusses Lincoln’s “slave [...]

Great graphics make difficult concepts understandable, and such graphics are what we aspire to each day at Cogent Legal. Today’s blog entry will dissect a graphic from the New York Times [...]

As former trial attorneys here at Cogent Legal, we know the value of good trial graphics. Our clients appreciate and understand the need for high-quality in-court presentation too. Recently, [...]

This article won the LitigationWorld Pick of the Week award. The editors of LitigationWorld, a free weekly email newsletter for litigators and others who work in litigation, give this award to [...]

On Tuesday, October 1, 2023 at noon Pacific Time, I will present a webinar for SFTLA entitled “Sipping From the Fire Hose: Techniques for Managing E-Discovery and Evidence in [...]

Good litigation graphics convey a message quickly and clearly. The example animation in today’s post supports an argument that plaintiff’s claim for a “reasonable royalty” [...]

As lawyers, we are always arguing about documents, and we often need to display those documents in court. In patent cases, displaying documents is particularly important because the [...]

Good animations can make difficult patent language and complicated patent diagrams come to life. An animation can make a bored judge or juror wake up, pay attention and engage with your argument. [...]

“I need a timeline.” This is how litigators often start in asking for legal graphics. This start to the graphics conversation makes sense because timelines are perhaps the most common [...]

For your next trial or important hearing, you should seriously consider using an e-brief to help the judge (and the judge's clerk) navigate and understand your argument. Cogent Legal recently [...]

In this blog, we occasionally like to share stories of how legal graphics can change the course of litigation. The following war story comes courtesy of Roger Mead, an accomplished litigator at [...]

This post is written by Michael Kelleher, Esq. Before I recently joined as a litigation consultant here at Cogent Legal, “Words” was my nickname at a previous job. Ironic, isn’t [...]