War Stories -Technology in the Courtroom

Ours is a visual society. One with an incredibly short attention span. Consider how many children and adults, are taking medication for ADD. This presents a challenge for the lawyer presenting a case in a courtroom. How to keep the jury’s attention, for the entire case, or at least for your client’s portion of it anyway?

Enter visual aids. You know, like those horrible manually turned film strips that put you to sleep in school as a child. No, not like that at all actually. Computers really are here to stay and they keep getting smaller, lighter and faster. Gone are the days of walking into a courtroom with 4 foot foam board backed blow ups of exhibits in black and white.

Um, not for everyone of course. There are more than a few attorney’s out there still doing just that. In my youth as a defense attorney, I had occasion to defend a group of physicians in a Northeastern Pennsylvania Courtroom. Imagine my surprise when the judge inquired, at the pretrial conference, if anyone intended to use ELMO. I thought immediately, the tickle me version? Or the dancing one? I wasn’t quite sure if we we were going to use him to show where the incisions were made. Oh, the horror!

Thankfully, this was a rare moment where I deferred having any opinion on the subject. ELMO as I find out is an overhead projector. You’re welcome for the free plug, ELMO USA. Overhead projectors are steadily being replaced or more frequently combined with, laptop computers for stunning visual presentation capability.

Look, we’re not dumb, we realize that you only listen to half of what we attorney’s say anyway. We can be boring, we get that. And courtrooms get warm and you get sleepy in the jury box, particularly after lunch. So it’s much better to show you what a mid line shift in the brain following a stroke looks like than to simply tell you about it. With animated computer imaging, we can do just that.

And really, what’s going to hold your interest and be remembered more when you are deliberating in the Jury Room –a flash animation of a stroke or a 4 foot foam backed blow up of a single page of a medical record you can’t possibly read anyway?

posted by David Marc Schwadron, Esq.