If You Want Someone To Read It ...Give Visual Incentives!

Long gone is the day of boring black and white text booklets of endless facts. If you really want someone to read what you have so patiently prepared, give them something that will visually stimulate them ...draw them into your information. At Med Art & Legal Graphics this is our specialty, we will take your information and make it clear, concise, and visually interesting. 

Be as visual as possible.
written by: Joe Kashi  (attorney and litigator)

Don’t be sparing in your use of digital photography and video clips within pleadings, particularly summary judgment motions. We are now definitely living in a highly visual age. Grey text and long-winded testimony isn’t as effective as a few striking photos or drop-dead deposition video clips.

At this point, if a deposition is worth taking, it is worth taking as a videotaped deposition. The cost differential isn’t that high and a videotaped deposition, once it is digitized and the transcript text synchronized, is far more useful in pleadings and in court. If you need telling deposition testimony to make a point in a pleading, in opening or closing, in cross-examination or to present as direct testimony, it is far more powerful and far more useful as a video clip than as dry text. Over the past five or six years, I have almost always rued taking a text-only deposition - almost inevitably, something was said that would have been much more useful as video.

As a secondary aspect, consider altering your deposition style so that you will have more short “sound bites” that might make useful video clips at trial. I prefer short video clips on the order of 30 seconds to not more than two minutes.

Combine all related pleadings into a single sequential file. For example, if you are dealing with a summary judgment motion, then rather than storing all of the documents separately, which become more time-consuming and harder to finder, make a single summary judgment file, starting with the Motion, then appending the memo, affidavits, exhibits, and other supporting documents. When any opposition, Rule 56f motion, reply, orders, etc are filed, then append these documents as well, in consecutive order. At the conclusion, you will have a complete history of the entire motion in one file and in consecutive order.

The original copy of certain types of documents, particularly photographic and video files, should be stored unaltered and in their original format both for later ease of use in case you need to print clean copies without photographic compression distortions and also in case you need to authenticate the photographs. It’s handy to embed working copies of these sorts of files into Acrobat documents but you must save the originals in their original format as well. I didn’t do so in one case and that omission caused me a lot of grief.

For more on Adobe's Typewriter Tool, view Adobe Tips.

Scan in discovery that the other side sends to you and then use Acrobat 7's typewriter tool to fill in the responses directly into the blanks under each discovery item. When I first showed this feature to my secretary, she found this feature to be a real time saver.

For heaven’s sake, remember that your electronic files are now your entire office.

Do a complete backup every night and take it off premises.

About the Author

Joe Kashi is an attorney and litigator living in Soldotna, Alaska, who is active in the Law Practice Management Section and a technology editor for Law Practice Today. He has written regularly on legal technology for the Law Practice Management Section, Law Office Computing magazine and other publications since 1990. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from MIT in 1973 and his J.D. from Georgetown University in 1976, and is admitted to practice in Alaska, Pennsylvania, the Ninth Circuit, and the U.S. Supreme Court.