This dialogue is intended to address the needs of anyone who finds a need to persuasively present complex facts. In addition to lawyers, it may be useful to sales professionals, business people, politicians or public relations professionals.
I have a strong interest in and motivation to use changing technology to improve upon my ability to organize information and utilize it in the courtroom and throughout the litigation process. I had an idea back in 2003 that maybe that maybe there was a reason why programs other than Word, Powerpoint and Excel were included in the Microsoft Office suite. I opened up Access and after a few hours of frustration, began to see value in the creation of relational databases for the purpose of case management and preparation. I like the following definition of such databases because it emphasizes the function and benefits to lawyers and other persuasive presenters:
A method of structuring data in the form of records so that relations between different entities and attributes can be used for data access and transformation.
Eventually, other programs caught my interest but I still use Access for certain types of cases. I hope to review and outline some of the many tools that I have come across and hope to uncover new ideas along the way.
It is no secret that modern criminal litigation has resulted in an increased number of cases where evidence is generated in huge quantities. Most cases still involve two to four material witnesses in my guess-timation, but many cases involve upwards of twenty witnesses, business records, phone records, hard drive data, and audio-video recordings. The DVD and even the hard drive have replaced photocopied and stapled documents as the storage medium for case information.
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