LAW OFFICE COMPUTING
July 2001
Winton Woods
One of the most exciting
aspects of modern desktop computer technology is the power that it confers on
all of us to engage in the creation and manipulation of graphic images. Now I'm
not talking about putting fancy shoes on O.J. Simpson's picture, although some
of the software that is now readily available allows almost anyone to change
and manipulate photographs. What I'm talking about is the ability to create
trial exhibits of various kinds. Computer generated graphics can be displayed
either by printing them out and putting them on traditional trial boards, or by
using a monitor system or digital projector in the courtroom. Obviously, the
simple monitor system is the least expensive to create and use, but in a jury
trial, there is a tough call to make. Even the largest monitor may not be able
to display fine type on a document or the minute details of a photograph. In
some courtrooms, each juror is given a small monitor so they are able to see
everything quite well but that is expensive to set up. In other courtrooms,
several large monitors are deployed so that every juror is no more than a few
feet away from a huge monitor. In the new eCourts, high quality digital thin screen
monitors provide very high quality images to two jurors at a time. In
courtrooms that are set up for it, however, a digital projector may still be
the best solution because of the size of the image it can generate. The latest
generation of digital projectors can produce a very bright image in a normally
lit room and thus may quickly become the mechanism of choice for courtroom
display technology. Obviously the projector can combine most of the benefits of
a trial board without the cost and convenience of electronic files.
The four general categories
of electronic exhibits are: 1) Word processing files displayed in their native
format; 2) Scanned images of documents stored on the computer hard drive as
"tiff" files; 3) Charts and graphs generated by graphing software or
spreadsheet software; and, 4) Scanned images of photographs and drawings that
are stored on the computer hard drive as "jpeg" or similar files.
Recently, the popularity of digital cameras that can directly post photographs
to a computer has exploded and we will see many digital photographs in the
future. Video is quickly become a force in courtroom litigation but it is a
large topic itself and will not be discussed here.
Any document created on a
word processor can be displayed in the courtroom because the monitor or
projector system is simply an extension of the computer desktop monitor. Thus
outlines or even charts created by word processors are easily displayed and
manipulated in the courtroom in the same way you would manipulate your word
processor. As we move to a world of electronic discovery and remote filing we
will work often with documents that have begun and lived their life as
electronic documents never reduced to paper. These documents can be displayed
on any electronic system without further ado.
Scanned Images Of Paper
Documents And Photographs
With the advent of
relatively high speed and inexpensive desktop scanners, the ability to scan
documents into the computer to be used at trial has been greatly enhanced.
There are two pieces of software that are far and away the best vehicles for
scanning and displaying these documents at low cost. The first is Kodak Imaging
Professional, which I have talked about many times in the past. Imaging
Professional is an absolutely wonderful and powerful program for both scanning
and displaying documents. Its display capabilities are very dramatic. You can
circle words with bright colored lines, you can highlight words very easily as
you would with a yellow marker, and you can zoom in on particular words with
the greatest of ease. So, if you have a smoking gun document that contains a
powerful admission by your opponent, you can highlight that admission and zoom
in on it, blowing it up to the full size of the screen. Imaging Professional is
very easy to use and costs less than $100. Download it from www.eastmansoftware.com.
PaperPort 7 is very
inexpensive and it works with almost any scanner. PaperPort has very powerful
tools for creating and manipulating photographs and similar images but it will
allow you to scan or import documents that you can then pre-treat or annotate
easily. PaperPort is not a terrific tool for display, however. It does have a
free viewer and it will export tiff files that can then be viewed in other
display software such as PowerPoint or Imaging Professional. It’s greatest power, however, is with photos
and objects. It has amazing capacity to correct color imbalance, crop, annotate
and otherwise improve photographs. Objects such as a gun or bloody glove can be
scanned and made ready for display with ease. Then you can drag and drop your
pretreated images directly into PowerPoint for display and presentation. I can’t
live a full life without PaperPort. You can download a free trial version at www.scansoft.com or buy it outright for the
princely sum of $59.00. It has several other amazing features that I will let
you discover on your own. It is discussed more fully in the September 2000 Law
Office Computing column.
Another important piece of
document management software is Adobe Acrobat. Adobe Acrobat is essentially an
electronic printer and you can put into it documents created in many different
software environments. PaperPort prints very nicely to Adobe. Documents are
stored as so-called "personal document files" or .pdf files. In general, they are compressed and thus
smaller files than the original. The .pdf file format is beginning to be widely
used in industry because it permits almost anyone who has basic Acrobat Reader
software (distributed freely over the Internet) to view and use Adobe
Acrobat-based documents. Acrobat allows much control over the image including a
very effective zoom mechanism. It has a good searching engine for text-based
documents. Acrobat is quickly becoming the software of choice in the electronic
filing field and may be worthy of your consideration. You can download it from www.adobe.com for $249 for the full package.
You can also download free the Acrobat reader that allows you to read .pdf
files but not create them.
Charts and graphs are
extraordinarily easy to create on a computer. Essentially, all you have to do
is to put the appropriate numbers into a chart and display that chart as a
graph. One of the fascinating things about this graphing capability is that
with most high-end spreadsheet programs, such as Paradox or Excel, you are able
to graph the same data set in many different ways. What you find when you do
that is that some graphs are far more effective than others, and indeed, you
may, as you look at the different graphs, come to understand relationships
between the constituent elements of the chart that you did not understand
before. The same data set can be displayed as a bar chart, as a pie chart, or
in a variety of other ways, and you can manipulate colors and shapes with ease.
There are some standalone graphics programs that are quite good, but if you buy
one of the standard office suites, such as Microsoft Office 2000 or Corel
Office Suite 2002 you will get powerful graphing capabilities as a part of the
Suite. Both Word 2000 and WordPerfect 10 have built in ability to create charts
and graphs.
It is, of course, always
important to have someone in your office who understands the graphics software
very well. I think, however, that trial lawyers ought to be involved in the
direct creation of trial exhibits. I think you will find that when you start to
do it, it helps you develop and organize your case. Of course you can have
someone else do it for you and if you have a big case with lots of documents
and exhibits you should probably do that. But if you work with short trials
with only a few hundred documents the investment of a few hundred dollars in
PaperPort 7 and Kodak Imaging Professional will pay you back with your first
trial. Besides, it is not hard to learn basic graphics software skills and I
think every lawyer who uses a computer should do that now. It can actually make
trial preparation fun, at least in part!