Litigation Support

Using PowerPoint in Voir Dire

By Blake Boyd

Monday morning before the start of trial is always busy for us in the litigation support field. It’s the last few hours before opening statement to make sure all the videos are synchronized, clips are tuned to perfection, documents scanned and PowerPoints completed. It’s the morning we spend in the jury room peering through files hoping we didn’t forget anything. Then there are the few rare occasions, such as the trial this week when we are asked to create a presentation for Voir Dire.

I have not spent the years in law school that most people reading this blog have, and I probably don’t know the rules as well as I should, but I’ve always understood that during Voir Dire you were not allowed to use “evidence”. So what what was I doing on really early Monday morning creating a PowerPoint that looked more like a opening statement than what would be asked during Voir Dire?

They wanted the definitions of negligence, preponderance of the evidence and proximate cause; typical of what you would find in a car wreck case. But what was this xray? Pictures of the accident scene? Bullet points of “What the Defendant did wrong”?

I didn’t think this was allowed.

When the attorneys mentioned this presentation the first thing that came to mind was, “where will I put the screen?”. Think about it.. Sitting in any courtroom I’ve been in, the judge is in the center. I don’t think the judge would be happy if I put a 10′ screen in front of her bench, blocking the whole jury panel. Unfortunately since Bexar County has it’s wonderful Presiding Court system, I started envisioning all the courtrooms in the Bexar County courthouse since I didn’t know which one I would be in. Almost every courtroom is different in this courthouse. And I quickly came to the conclusion that in some of them, it would be impossible to set the screen let alone the projector where the panel could see it.

Luckily Monday morning we got assigned to a old, but huge courtroom. I was able to setup the screen in the end of the jury box facing the back of the room where a panel of 85 sat. That was one of the reasons we were assigned here, we needed a large panel due to a drunk driver being involved in the suit.

I still don’t know how my client got away with it, but the show went on without a hitch. He informed opposing counsel that we were using definitions, pictures of the vehicles, wreck site, and some “other small things”; with no objections. I glanced over at the defense attorney as I came to the xray photos and I’m pretty sure I saw a vein pop out of his head. Still, no objections.

I’ve been seeing a trend of attorneys narrowing the line between opening statement and voir dire lately. More and more it’s about getting the first word in, versus trying to learn about a panel. I’ve always been an advocate preaching your case in voir dire; if you’re the plaintiff it really does give you an advantage. Telling your story while at the same time getting feedback from the jury may be an art, but it can be done.

Here’s the final PowerPoint presentation we used during voir dire. It’s very basic as not to distract. The goal was to only have the panel and attorney to glance at for reference. Only main topics had slides, so when questions were being asked that were not case specific we switched to a black slide.

Is the video not loading correctly? Sometimes it does for me in FF3 sometimes not?

Full post as published by The Trial Technologist's View on August 22, 2008 (boomark / email).