Ace law librarian and Internet researcher Genie Tyburski recently published her “10 Essential Web Sites for Litigators.” Since I don't do litigation now, I tend to forget about the various court docket review sites, so you courthouse lawyers should check this out for certain.
For some time now I've wanted to do a thoughtful and impressive blog post on PowerPoint. As many of you know, I create PowerPoint presentations pretty much every time I do a presentation. I think PowerPoint can enhance any presentation. OK, I will admit the PP show with 53 slides on "Introduction to Fantasy Football" for our 12 year old boys and their dads FFB league meeting wasn't that well received. But I probably just needed to tweak it a bit more.
By now you have already figured I that I rethought writing that "thoughtful and impressive blog post idea." Instead, I decided to clean out the "potential blog posts on PowerPoint" file. So I have to lead off with a link to a You Tube video, Life After Death by PowerPoint featuring Comedian Don McMillan. If you haven't seen it, watch it. Trust me (and the 500,000 other people who have watched it.)
It's really trendy to criticize poor PowerPoint presentations. We've all seen them. More and more lawyers are using PowerPoint presentations in court. That creates some responsibility on their part. It's one thing to treat your friends to 158 slides of your summer vacation pictures or to include the entire text of a dozen federal regulations on the slide show for your Continuing Legal Education presentation. But if your client is paying you to show a PowerPoint to a jury, it probably should be good. Evan Schaeffer rides to the rescue with a post linking to several examples of PowerPoints used at trial, including Dave Swanner's offer (now over two years old) to send a CD packed with over 100 PowerPoint examples to plaintiff's lawyers. Dave does ask you add to wealth by contributing your own examples for the next edition of the CD either now or when you figure out PowerPoint.
But you need not be a plaintiff's lawyer to check out this collection of 70+ PowerPoint and Presentations Resources and Examples. Hat tip to Matt Homann.
Cliff Atkinson has made quite a name for himself writing about PowerPoint with his Beyond Bullet Points books and Beyond Bullets Blog. Recently he has decided to transition away from the free blog to a new user subscription website, BBP Online. At some point he says this will cost $25 per month, but for now charter subscribers can sign up at a rate of $25 per year.
If you want to think in depth about your presentation skills, you can always visit the Presentation Zen blog. For an example of a PowerPoint tips there, check out this post.
Here's a sad story. A law firm received a great deal of offensive and pornographic spam. They had a spam filter, but a lot was still slipping by. Some offended employees complained. Even though this is not the fault of the law firm, I'm sure the complaints struck a nerve. You don't want your employees exposed to something that offends them and one wonders if the situation could give rise to a hostile work environment claim. So they dial up their spam filter and then miss an e-mailed court notice of a hearing. As a result the judge hit them with an order requiring them to pay the costs and the fees of the opposing counsel who appeared at the hearing, a sum thought to be several thousand dollars.
A stunning thing about this story was a quote from a lawyer-technologist who disdained the use of whitelisting tools because they had to be "manually maintained." As most readers know, a whitelist feature would allow e-mail for certain users to go through to the recipient, no matter what it triggered in the spam filter. All federal bankruptcy and district courts now use CM/ECF (Case Management/Electronic Case Filing) and notices of filed pleadings go out via e-mail.
OK, here's a law practice tip you can take to the bank, folks. if you practice in any CM/ECF court, your spam filter needs to have a whitelist feature and you need to use it for every court that may send you an e-mail notice. Like it or not, once you have "agreed" to receive notices via e-mail, you just can't plead "my spam filter ate my homework." If your spam filter cannot do that, then you need a new one. Sometimes it might be as simple as adding a sender's address to your contacts to get it whitelisted. I'm not saying it will be that easy for everyone. I about blew a gasket the other day when my spam filter told me there was a limit of 250 and I had to delete someone to be able to add someone. But you don't have a choice. The argument that it is too big a burden to manually maintain a whitelist was not persuasive to this judge nor will it be to others,
It seems to me that one of the trends we will see in legal blogging is an emergence of group blogs. After all, really significant well thought-out blog posts can take some time to craft and a lot of really great lawyers don't have a lot of free time on their hands. Combining efforts can mean a more regular stream of content and likely a greater readership of the posts one does make. It may dillute some of the marketing effect, but that may not be a primary goal of some of these lawyer-bloggers anyway.
The Trial Lawyer Resource Center is an excellent example of this kind of blog. It is very visually appealing. The contributions of thirteen Contributing Attorneys and guest posters keep regular content flowing. The site breaks with the usual blog convention of posts chronologically displayed in favor of focusing on the categories, with two or three recent posts displayed under categories like "Openings and Closings" or "Case Work Up." You can explore the category for more content. Instead of visiting an online diary or journal, here the feeling is more like stopping by a concise reference library. Using the About tab to explain the three best ways to peruse the site is a nice touch, particularly since many trial lawyers who are not regular readers of blogs may visit here. This is a relatively new blog, with regular postings beginning in August, 2006.
The TLRC already has a lot of nice content and has a huge potential for growth. Do some trial lawyers you know a favor and send them the URL for this blog. (Or send them the Permalink for this post.)
The Trial Lawyer Resource Center is my Website of the Week.
But, just in case any of those involved with this great site read this post, let me offer a couple of bits of constructive criticism. Even though I love the appearance and know many readers will just subscribe to the RSS or e-mail feed, you still will have many visitors to the site. Most everyone likes to know what the latest news is. Instead of having to scroll alllllll the way down for the Recent Updates list, move that up "above the fold" and bump one of the categories lower. My second concern? Well, gee, you don't have any practice management blogs in the your lists of other blogs. (Hint, hint.)
Some people don't like the idea of PowerPoint presentations being submitted as the written materials for Continuing Legal Education programs. But we see more and more sets of PowerPoint slides submitted as the written materials for CLE programs. For some types of programs, especially techno-CLE's like 50 Tips in 50 Minutes, 60 Websites in 60 Minutes or My Favorite Utilities, these work quite well.
But my topic today is not whether they should be submitted, but how they should be submitted. I often see PowerPoint slides printed off at four slides per page. This may save paper, but the result after duplication is sometimes too poor to be readable. Two slides per page will be readable and, of course, one slide per page will approximate a handheld copy of the slide show. Some prefer using the handout printout with the sets of lines next to the slides for note taking. This is especially good if you are giving the handout to a small group, I think.
Know your printing options. For printed CLE materials, I think the real trick is to print the slides in pure black and white rather than color or grayscale. You can either print to your printer or print to a PDF if you have that capability. The result will be very legible, even it a sacrifices a bit of your graphic design elements. But actually that is a good thing for the CLE presenter. Let them have the black and white version for the handout. You get to display the full-color version during your presentation.
Of course, if they are going to be distributed electronically, then it is different. I'd never send a native PowerPoint to a CLE provider. They might not have PowerPoint or might have a different version. Or the slides just might not print the same for them. You want to see the final product you are providing. So print the presentation to PDF in full color at one slide per page. Then review it before you e-mail it or copy it onto the CD.
The point is that you have dedicated a lot of time to preparing your presentation and your PowerPoint. You want to make a good impression. Spend a few extra minutes with Print Preview and printing some test pages to make sure the handouts people take home give the best impression of you as well.
The new issue of LawPro magazine has hit the Internet and our friends from north of the border have hit another home run. The theme of this issue is electronic discovery and every lawyer should go download it now. As I keep telling groups of lawyers, general familarity with electronic discovery will be needed in almost every aspect of the practice of law from corporate governance to family law to litigation. From Dan Pinnington's article on "Why Electronic Documents are Different" to Susan Wortzman's article on "Spoliation, Preservation and other 'Gotchas" to the downloadable sample electronic discovery request letter, you'll be glad you took the time to download this entire publication. True, it is geared for Canadians, but you may have noted we have few precedents of any kind at the moment.
OKLAHOMA LAWYERS, and those within easy travel distance, should not forget our Oklahoma Electronic Discovery Summit slated for September 22-23 at the Reed Center in Midwest City, OK. We've added even more value to this program with local and national vendors attending and a free ED forms CD to be provided to all attendees. For more info, go here.
"Famous blawger" has to be an oxymoron. None of us have to deal with the National Enquirer calling or paparazzi sneaking up on us (unless you count Bob Ambrogi taking pictures at BlawgConnect.) But Evan Schaeffer qualifies for this label. He has three weblogs, including the well-known Evan Schaeffer's Legal Underground. But I like his Illinois Trial Practice Weblog the best. I do not overstate the case when I say that this weblog should be required reading for every young (or new) trial lawyer. Just last Friday he had a great post on "How to Start a Deposition." (For more fun, surf over to his other blog for "The Horror of My First Deposition.") A couple of weeks ago he outlined a list of validating questions to be used before impeachment of a witness at trial.
Great content, consistently delivered, earns the Illinois Trial Practice Weblog my selection as Website of the Week.
More details about the Oklahoma Electronic Discovery Summit (and enrollment information) are now available here. I did a prior blog post about some of the highlights here. I'm sure we will have a large number of litigators present, but electronic discovery awareness and understanding is not just for litigators. Corporate lawyers need to advise clients on document retention and destruction policies. Criminal prosecutions are being built on electronic evidence. Family lawyers are finding Internet use records becoming relevant and important. Sifting through hundreds of thousands of digital records requires new tools and techniques.
The 2005 Oklahoma Electronic Discovery Summit will be held on September 22 and 23, 2005 at the Reed Center in Midwest City, Oklahoma. The details will be released in a few days and I'll link to them here then, but we have a strong lineup of speakers including:
I was really struck by the thoughtful post on understanding electronic discovery posted by Ernie the Attorney on June 30th. Reading that may motivate you to register for our conference, after we open registration. ED is not going away.
The final Star Wars movie is now playing in the theaters. But how many lawyers would want their assignment to be as a "Death Star Pilot?" For an interesting tale of major league electronic discovery, read the Corporate Counsel feature "This is Spinal Tech."
From the article: "The electronic review conference room was like the back of a special operations truck, says Swain. Forensics Consulting Solutions, which had advised Jeffer, Mangels on electronic discovery, brought in seven black computers to run the Patterns software. The attorneys became known as the Death Star Pilots, and their days were regimented. From 9 a.m. until 8 p.m., they reviewed the data in 1,000-document batches. A special master delegate was always present to ensure that attorneys weren't saving, printing, or copying files. (Medtronic had agreed to provide the data for Patterns in its original file format under the condition that it couldn't be copied.) When the delegate needed a bathroom break, work stopped, and the data hard drives were locked up."
It worked. A dozen Death Star Pilots processed 44 million electronic pages in less than four months, an incriminating spreadsheet was located and the jury rendered a huge verdict. Plus a dozen or so lawyers have really interesting entries for their resumes should they want to use them.
Thanks to the Electronic Discovery Today Blog for the pointer.
We've all sat through lots of PowerPoint presentations─some good and some not-so-good. Many "experts" are saying you shouldn't use PowerPoint now. Well, they are wrong IMHO. There is a lot of research that concludes that people remember information better when they receive it through both their eyes and ears. However, if you use the standard templates bundled with PowerPoint, you run the risk that someone in the audience (or jury) will have seen the color scheme before and be less attentive or distracted by thoughts of the prior programs. Enter Brainy Betty with many unusual free fonts and PowerPoint templates for you to download and use. These are not just primary colors rearranged, but very professional designs. She also provides tutorials and lots of advanced information about preparing presentations. Great site.
Please do not misunderstand me. A bad PowerPoint is still bad. Speakers should look at the audience, not their own PowerPoint. And excessively clinging to a PowerPoint may suck all of the life and poetry out of a speech. See, e.g. The Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint.
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