PowerPoint, the Law & Web Presence

The Baltimore Sun has an interesting article "A New Way to Persuade" about how a law firm has hired a PowerPoint expert to help them create the visual stories to persuade jurors.  The firm has hired him to "one-dimensional" evidence that tends to dominate civil cases - medical records, correspondence and anatomical drawings - into the kinds of three-dimensional presentations that jurors have grown accustomed to seeing on television and at the movies" according to Paul Beckman the managing partner with Salsbury Clements Bekman Marder & Adkins.

Law schools and professional development outfits are working with lawyers to continue to professionalize their use of technology in the courtroom.  Cliff Atkinson at Beyond Bullet Points, is one of the consultants who has been hired by attorneys with some degree of success.

Editorial comment:

I was curious to see what the Salsbury Clements Bekman Marder & Adkins website looked like so tried to do a search for it.  I didn't find a company web site listed among the first three pages of Google search results.  The firm might be on track with their plans for visualization in the court room and generating the PR that this article creates, but it looks like SCBMA, needs some help with communicating via the web.  Although on the small side, according to Lexis Nexis they are a 10 person firm, they still need to pay some attention to their web presence.