Best Article I’ve Read This Week: Powerful Points to Consider with PowerPoint

By: Suann Ingle

PowerPoint continues to take a lot of hits lately for being ubiquitous, pointless, overused, over-animated, flashy, over-relied upon and distracting in many different fields – education, healthcare, government, law, corporate life to name only a few. This should surprise no one, especially since it has become so widely used. In a 2012 piece, BusinessWeek estimated one billion installations of the software. That same article also estimated 350 presentations happening every second across the globe. It should also surprise no one that almost as many opinions about its evolving worth have resulted.

Its widespread use is likely similar to what Microsoft Word did to both writing (I type, Voila! therefore I write) and to the lost art of typesetting by hand (if you still double space after a period, you shouldn’t). Courtrooms and other venues of dispute resolution are increasingly wired and ready for such presentations. And with an estimated 95% of the presentation software market cornered, PowerPoint is the go-to tool many legal teams use to preview and highlight evidence they expect to come in at trial, and also to sum up the evidence that actually has come in when they argue closing. In addition, they use the software to organize their thoughts, thinking perhaps that they are saving time.

PowerPoint is an incredibly sophisticated and versatile tool, one that in the right hands can also be an effective and persuasive complement to an oral presentation in the courtroom. This essay explores the current use of PowerPoint in courtroom presentations. It imagines a higher level of quality when “beauty” is considered and applied, that differentiates from the expected, safe, pedestrian types of presentations.

Read the full article here:

http://www.thejuryexpert.com/2014/05/powerpoint-in-the-courtroom-powerful-points-to-consider/

Best Article I’ve Read This Week: Design is Everything When Communicating Your Message

by Ken Lopez
A2L Consulting

Although trained as a lawyer, one of my passions is good design. I appreciate good design whether it appears in architecture, in the way a product is put together, or in the way a print advertisement is composed. I especially appreciate good design in litigation graphics.

So what is good design? I define good design as the intersection of beautiful form and elegant function. Regardless of the application, finding the sweet spot for that intersection is the real challenge.

A door handle that is beautiful but makes a door hard to open is bad design. A luxury automobile that wins awards for its elegance but is hard to drive is bad design. And a litigation graphic that is gorgeous but fails to quickly inform and persuade is bad design.

The best litigation graphics are those that deliver results and are well-designed (not necessarily beautifully designed) in their form. However, the point where one strike the balance between form and function is entirely different in the case of litigation graphics.

Full article here:

http://www.a2lc.com/blog/bid/71143/Litigation-Graphics-It-s-Not-a-Beauty-Contest?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+a2lc+%28The+Litigation+Consulting+Report+from+A2L+Consulting%29

 

Be a Bucket Filler and your Bucket will always be Full

It all started a few weeks ago. I overheard my children arguing and my son, through his tears, called my  daughter  a “bucket dipper”.  I stopped and tried to process what that was…name calling is a punishable offense in our house typically. I asked him to repeat it so I could make sure I heard it correctly and then I asked him what he was talking about.  My daughter clearly knew as she had become  quite upset at the insult.  What I didn’t realize at the time was how powerful of an insult that term really was.

It was based on a book that is used for character education at my children’s’ school called “Have You Filled A Bucket Today”. The idea very simply is that we all have an invisible bucket that we carry around and at any time we can FILL other people’s’ buckets or others can…

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