Mark Lanier at Harvard

Mark Lanier recently gave an excellent "war stories" lecture to a Harvard Law Torts Class. Although the subject was how to be a great litigation lawyer generally, there's plenty of great examples and discussion on the use of PowerPoint at trial. Watch and learn.

PS--The professor also provides a great example of how not to introduce a guest speaker: First, read a long introduction so your audience knows you really don't know anything about this guy. Second, read it fast so everybody knows the actual practice of law is far beneath you.

Animation in PowerPoint

Ellen Finkelstein has a great tutorial on animation in PowerPoint.

Where's Waldo?

As hard as it is to find Waldo, it's often harder and always more important to locate that critical witness for your case. There are a number of free internet sites that can help you do that. Here are five of the best:

1. ZabaSearch

This one has a very large database, which is good, but if you are searching for someone armed only with a common name, you’ll get an unwieldy result. ZabaSearch also provides historical address information, home address, birth date, phone number, and the ability to contact the person by email.

2. Spock

Spock's best feature is information about a person’s footprint on the Internet, rather than basic details like phone numbers and addresses. Spock draws info from blogs, Wikipedia articles, photo sharing sites, social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn), social bookmarking sites, and more.

3. Yasni

Like Spock, Yasni gives you a picture of the person on the Internet. Unlike Spock, however, Yasni will email you if your search name is mentioned on the Internet. (Of course, you can also use Google Alerts for this.)

4. Pipl

Pipl does a “deep web search” to find all kinds of information about someone, from their address and contact info to any publications they have ever posted to the Internet.

5. 123People

123people shows pictures of people, so you can quickly filter out all the wrong people. It also lists out all the email addresses it can find.

Hat tip: Online Tech Tips

Good E-discovery List

The September 2008 issue of BullsEye Newsletter has an thorough, annotated collection of e-discovery resources.

White Space on the Web

Good tips on white space from Set in Style:

The pro uses white space to separate elements, and — if you want to look good — so will you, and it’s so easy to do.

When you insert an image in a post, specify white space like so:

style=”margin 10px;”

Then, before you publish the post, preview it and make sure there’s sufficient (but not excessive) white space around the image.

Also note that the pro sets copy in narrower columns than the novice. As a general rule, never set copy so there are more than 80 characters per line.

Information about the role of white space:

• Reading Online Text: A Comparison of Four White Space Layouts
• Finding Information on the Web: Does the Amount of Whitespace Really Matter?
• Use Whitespace to Indicate Relationships Between Content Elements
• The Effects of Contrast and Density on Visual Web Search