Benefits Using Multimedia Technology
From the day a client walks through the door, the focus is to obtain a favorable result. As an advocate, you must demonstrate to whomever is deciding your case the strength of your position and the weakness of your opponent’s case. To prove your case, you need to persuade the factfinder using witnesses and exhibits that demonstrate the merits of your case. One of the most effective and important methods of persuading the factfinder is through the use of multimedia aids. Seeing and hearing is believing. Our society, including judges, expects to be entertained and taught through multimedia. The preparation of multimedia visual presentations can be calculated to be persuasive of a particular position and to assist in convincing the trier of fact to reach a decision in your client’s favor. Visual aids summarize, supplement and assist in conveying your message to the trier of fact. Common sense and a substantial amount of research dollars demonstrate that advertisements, TV ads, and movies all stimulate and persuade us. Millions of dollars are spent on advertising campaigns to convince us to purchase services or products. The latest visual techniques ? including color patterns ? can be observed on TV on a daily basis. When you see commercial ads, use your imagination to see if they can be applied to a case. For example, the show "60 Minutes" uses persuasive techniques to highlight documentary evidence to influence you. With the advances in digital information, the latest buzzword is multimedia. Multimedia is the integration of data, text, image, audio, or video in a single application. We are living through a digital revolution where information is presented to us in a multimedia context. Multimedia is both a technology and communications concept. As a technology concept, multimedia is explained in the sense of using text, sound, graphics, video, and animations to persuade. Multimedia is taking the various forms of media - sound, text, graphics, video and animations - and presenting various combinations of the above to communicate and persuade a trier of fact as to your client’s position. As a communications concept, which is more important then multimedia as a technology concept, the digitization of information for use in multimedia provides a new and dynamic method of presenting your case to the trier of fact. It adds immediacy and realism to dry exhibits. Only in the last 15 years have we been able to digitize and present our case information in this new and persuasive way. Digital multimedia for legal applications means being able to display your case documents as computer images, enlarge the relevant document sections, draw on the documents in various colors, or put them side by side on a monitor to focus the jury’s attention on the points that are important to your client. It means having a witness’s deposition on CD-ROM for immediate access and stopping the video and bringing up a document pertaining to the witness alongside the video for the factfinder. It means using charting and presentation programs for bullet slides, organizational charts, or a timeline of your case. See also, Chapter 6, Multimedia - Text, Graphics, Sound, Photographs and Video. Multimedia presentations should be the norm in our cases. The rest of the world expects presentations that provide multi-sensory stimulus to learn and decide the merits of products and services, why not disputes? There are many important benefits to using computer technology in your case during legal proceedings:
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