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

Sky Writing

Writeboard is a very cool application that allows joint work on documents.

The Audacity of Presenting Recorded Statements at Trial

I recently read about a program that dramatically improves the ease of presenting recorded statements: Audacity (available for both Mac and PC at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/). All you need is a digital recording of the witness's original statement and some basic knowledge about how to cut and paste on a computer. Once you install the program, you'll see a screen that looks something like this:

The program is pretty easy to use, and they've got full documentation on their site. Once you learn how to use it, you can do some amazing things with audio statements. For example, here are some of the different ways you can use this program:

Redacting an audio statement to remove irrelevant sections. No longer do you have to worry about the jury hearing irrelevant, suppressed, or improper comments. Simply highlight the improper comment and click . Presto! The statement will be removed, and you can now save the file as a new audio recording.

Extracting admissions from longer statements. Let's say you don't want to replay the entire witness statement, but only want to replay a small snippet. Audacity makes it easy to extract those admissions from extended audio recordings. Here's all you'd need to do:

1. Go to and click .
2. Choose the audio recording you want to import.
3. Use the selection tool to highlight the audio segment you want to export. (It's almost the same as highlighting a paragraph in Word and clicking "Copy")
4. Click and scroll down to
5. Choose a filename for your recording. (It's easier to retrieve the correct statement during trial if you use descriptive titles for each file, such as "The Light was Red" or "The Light was Green").
6. Click "SAVE"

That's it! Now you have a standalone .WAV file of the admission that you can play on any computer. Be creative and think of how you could use those admissions. Could you use them during settlement negotiations by burning a "Greatest Hits" CD for your opponent? ("Here are the six times during depositions where C.E.O. admits to liability.") Or import the statements to your iTunes playlist, so you can quickly click on the correct statement to impeach witnesses during cross-examination?

Maybe you want to use the statements during closing to compare and contrast what different witnesses said about the same events: "What was their understanding of the performance metrics for promotions? Let's hear what the CEO, Jon Smith, had to say [PLAY CLIP #1]. But the CFO, Jane Smith, said something entirely different [PLAY CLIP #2]."

Statements of party opponents, especially recorded ones, can be some of the most powerful evidence you'll ever admit. But just as with every other exhibit or testimony that you'll ever offer into evidence, it's not enough to simply understand what you should show to the jury. To get the most out of your evidence, you'll also need to master knowing when you should admit it and how you should publish it. Learn how to use an audio editing program like Audacity to extract your admissions, and you'll be able to play them to maximum effect for your jury.

E-Discovery and Special Masters

If you want to see the future of e-discovery, read Special Masters and E-Discovery: The Intersection of Two Recent Revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, by the Honorable Shira A. Scheindlin & Jonathan M. Redgrave in 30 Cardozo L. R. 347 (2008).