South Carolina Trial Law Blog

Here is a guest post from Brian Ford.

As a Multimedia Trial Site Specialist, the general rule of thumb has always been that a "seamless" presentation plays best in front of a Jury. This means, in part, avoiding the use of on-screen toolbars and minimizing vocal communication between the presenting attorney and the tech specialist.

My experiences have proven otherwise, though: Jurors are (and should be) focused on the evidence, more than how seamlessly it is presented. While it is true that a well-oiled presentation certainly can't hurt, these factors are nowhere near as important as the overall quality of the evidence, and the care that has gone into designing demonstratives.

Assuming the latter, a slight lag or visual hiccup isn't going to mean much to a Jury dedicated to a contemplation of the facts and a fair interpretation of the available evidence.

I’m willing to give away a few secrets. Here is how to ace a job interview with me:

• Read this Blog Post – One of the first questions I ask is “What do you know about me?” It amazes me the number of people of people that don’t even take the time and effort to type my name in Google and see what pops up. I have a reasonable internet presence and to not even look at my website or weblog, before coming to the interview is slack. I don’t expect someone to know everything about me, but to not even look at the website and the areas of practice shows a profound lack of interest, that I find unattractive in a job candidate.
• Read the Practice Management Section of the Blog – I’ve been writing for 2 1/2 years and have very specific ideas about how I want a law practice to run. My ideas are well thought out, but run counter to a lot of lawyers out there. But you can really get an idea for what I want by reading the practice management section of the blog.
• Be a Real Person – I’m not a high falutin’ person. Just because I have a J.D. doesn’t make me snobby. While I’ll be nice and cordial, I don’t want a hoity-toity employee. Be nice and be yourself.
• Be Used to Dealing with People – I have a Plaintiff’s practice and we deal with the public. We have a lot of workers comp cases and construction workers and other blue collar people. I find a lot of defense paralegals aren’t used to dealing with the public. Very few people really have the knowledge and skills to accurately judge how good of lawyers we are, but 100% know whether we’re nice to them.
• Be Technically Adept – You don’t have to be a power user, but knowing how to do a Google search and find information on the internet is useful. Knowing the difference between a .pdf and a .jpg is helpful. Knowing how to get information on the internets is helpful.

In the scheme of things, the only make or break question is someone that doesn’t even take the time before the interview to type my name into a search engine to see what pops up. So giving this tip on my blog isn’t really that much of a tip-off anyways. And in case you’re wondering, if someone has just moved and doesn’t have their computer unpacked or cable service set up, I will cut them some slack for that.

I got this idea from Cheryl Leone in Raleigh. At the beginning of April, we started leaving the office at 1:00 p.m. on Fridays.

We cut the lunch hour from an hour to half an hour and came in half an hour early each day of the week. Then we work through lunch on Friday and leave at 1:00 p.m.

This give the employees time to schedule doctor’s appointments, get their hair cut, make appointments, run errands or just start the weekend early.

The nice thing about it is that they have a set time off each week to take care of things if they need to. Plus, it’s nice to have Friday afternoons off in the summertime at the beach.

The picture doesn’t do justice to how cool PicLens actually is.

PicLens is a FireFox or Explorer add-on (yes, it also works with Safari) that allows you to scroll through pictures very quickly.

Install it, go to Google Images and type in ‘herniated disk’ then click on the little > Play icon, and you will see a wall of herniated disks. While Google Images lets you see just the pictures, you have to flip through a page at a time. With PicLens, you don’t have to worry about the pages, you can just scroll through all of the pictures.

Trust me, it works much better than I can describe it. Check out the demo and then add it as a plug-in. Have fun.

Hat tip to Matt Homann for the heads up on this.

Some excellent advice from Evan Schaeffer at the Illinois Trial Practice Blog:

Once you get good testimony at a deposition, you're best to leave the testimony alone. Take the good answer from the witness and move on.

It seems like obvious advice, but some lawyers can't wait to read the good answer in the printed transcript. Perhaps not believing their good fortune, or perhaps wanting to relive the excitement of the five minutes when everything was going their way, they return to the question again a little later in the deposition. They ask the question to which they got a good answer a second time.

Why give the witness a chance to change or explain his answer? I can think of only a couple of reasons, neither of them very good: (1) You're not sure whether you've pinned the witness down or (2) you can't remember what the witness said.

I have to say that I’ve seen this more than once. When you get good testimony, don’t give the witness a chance to rehabilitate himself.

For more information on depositions, check out Evan’s excellent book: Deposition Checklists & Strategies.

I am very interested in SmartAdvocate. It’s a new case management system that’s coming out on the market.

It’s specifically geared towards, plaintiff’s personal injury work.

It is an off-shoot of the in-house program that Parker & Waichman has been using.

I heard about this system a few years ago and it looks great.

A few of the features that I like, when a case is set up, it sets up an extra-net or ‘mini-website’ for each client and case that allows them to see the accident reports, medical records or other information as it comes in.

No matter how good the case is, if you have a ‘bad client’, it’s still a bad case. What is a bad client?

• Unreasonable Expectations
• Won’t Follow Reasonable Medical Advice
• Won’t Follow Reasonable Legal Advice
• Abusive
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I finally broke down and got a new laptop. For those who are long time readers, they know I’ve been searching for a laptop for awhile.

I dearly loved my Japanese Panasonic Y2 but after three and a half years, it was time for an upgrade. After the third system failure in nine months, it really was time to get a new one. About 6 months ago, when the laptop went down, I was going to get a new laptop, but they got the Panasonic up and running and I put the new laptop purchase off. A month ago, the Panasonic’s hard drive completely and totally went out again and it was time to upgrade. Here’s what I have on the Toshiba Portege R500:

• Ultra-light – 1.72 pounds
• Ultra-thin – .77 inches thick
• Solid State Hard Drive – 64 gigabyte solid state drive
• Windows XP – Some non-Vista operating system love.
• Full size keyboard – I will have to double check, I think, there is a silght reduction in the size of keyboard (1mm – 2mm reduction), but it is a very nice full size keyboard that doesn’t take time to re-train your fingers to deal with.
• 12.1” Wide screen monitor – I’m nearly 44 years old and my eysesight isn’t what it once was (macular degeneration). I was a bit concerned about bumping down from a 14.1” monitor to a 12.1” wide screen monitor. My previous laptop before the Panasonic was a 12” laptop and I really think that’s too small. The new Toshiba has a widescreen which means it is actually the same size width way as the 14.1” monitor, but it is just not as long.
• Great LED display – Very crips display. Very nice look. It has an outdoor button to turn the backlighting off. The sunlight then bounces off the screen and brightens it. It actually does work. Neat stuff.
• Lots of Ports – 3 USB ports, 1 PC Card port, VGA out, SD card slot, firewire.
• Removeable battery – You can get a second battery for travelling, or a larger battery for when you want to be away from a power supply for an extended period of time.

So far, I’ve loaded up the software and am loving it. I’ll let you know more as I go along.

I was talking with a friend recently about case selection. He said he was taught to take the following cases:

• Limited Damages with Very Clear Liability
• Tough Liability with Significant Damages

That’s a good rule of thumb. It takes an awful lot of time and effort to gear up for trial, and you typically want significant damages to be cost effective, but if there’s very clear liability, you can do that with lesser damages. Also, if your clients has several hundred thousand in doctor’s bills, then it doesn’t hurt to look harder for liability, or fight liability issues on contested cases. But I’ll add another caveat:

• If the Client is a Bad Client, Regardless of Anything Else, It’s a Bad Case

If there’s clear liability and significant damages, but your client is a problem client or bad client, then it’s a bad case. If they’re a bad client, they will find a way to sabotage their case.

For years, I’ve bought computers with dvd-burners and looked at video editing software and have never been able to make anything work.

All I want to do is do a 5–10 minute interview with my client and then pull 15 second clips out of the full length video. I didn’t need a lot of editing, but just wanted to pull out some clips. I’ve tried high end professional packages and low end consumer software. Nothing seemed to work.

I bought a Sony videocamera that recorded straight to mini-dvd’s. That was relatively easy, but it was still a hassle getting everything onto the computer.

I’m sure if I spent an entire day learning the camera and the software I could have figured it out, but who wants to do that?

I recently bought a Flip videocamera and can’t be happier. It’s about the size of a pack of cigarettes and runs on two ‘AA’ batteries. There’s no AC power, plug-in cord or adapter. Just two ‘AA’ batteries. There’s an on/off switch a record and pause button and that’s about it.

There’s an arm that flips out (hence the name) and plugs into a USB port. The software for the camera is built in to the camera. You can download straight to the computer very easily or upload a file to Youtube easily. Here is the law firm Youtube link and the family Youtube link. is There are no tapes, disks or memory cards. It can record up to an hour (in a single or multiple clips) and that’s it.

The picture quality is good, but not perfect. The microphone is much better than I thought it would be. And the best part of it? It only costs $145.

It’s cheap enough and light enough that you can take it anywhere with you. I’m very impressed with the quality of sound and picture, the ease of use, the size and how easily I can get the movie clips onto the computer or the internet.