"Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success."
- Henry Ford
The War Room
The War Room
The war room is the lifeblood and neural network of any trial. A war room, thoroughly designed is critical for trial preparation. As the trial consultant component of the equation, the key element to success is theintegration of our teams. With redundent and open lines of communication and very clear identification of roles - the resulting collaboration and teamwork is vital to smooth days in court and a favorable outcome.
As they say, a chain is only as strong as it's weakest link and no where is that more evident than in the war room. We'll work with you to define production and data flow as well as coordinate the logistics for equipment, services and professionals that may be on-site or remotely supporting the matter. Following some of the activities we facilitate in the war room:
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Team: Staffing solutions are determined by the type, length and complexity of the matter at hand. Most often, our team will grow or shrink pending the day-to-day needs in both the ares of grahics and technology. We monitor utilization and staff on an as-needed basis to eliminate unnecessary expense.
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Technology Integration: From Concordance or Summation, etc., we'll export your case database to create our trial presentation database. Trial Director has sophisticated tools for importing documents, photos, video, depostions, transcripts, animations, illustrations and your coded data.
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Equipment: Technicians typically require devoted gear for their daily procedures. Items may include, a router and switches to create a team sub-network, scanning station, high-speed, full-color printer(s), a data-server, projector(s) and screen(s) for team dry-runs and witness prep.
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Exhibits: As your exhibit list is a moving target with daily supplements, we'll integrate additions into our database and provide the services such as stampling, branding, redacting, annotating, etc.
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Designations: We'll work with your designations on a rolling basis to issue original, counter and rebuttal designations. Prior to trial, we'll take your depositions and create the indexed, deponent database in Trial Director and share those via an iPad App.
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Witness Prep: An extremely important exercise is performing dry-runs of all presentations before the court date. Benefits include: developing a predictable dialogue with the hotseat operator to ensure smooth call-up of exhibits, pre-treating annotations, establishing a comfortable presentation pace for the witness, identifying for the hotseat operator the exhibits that are inflammatory so we can react accordingly, work out technical glitches and ensure integrity of the trial database itself.
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Presentation Scripting: Early in the process the presenting attorney and the trial consultant should ensure that outlines are incorporating an agreed upon naming/coding convention for exhibits. With this the trial consultant will create e-binders for those witnesses thus streamling the presentation process in court. Although scripted, the hotseat operator can always bring up a document and annotate on the fly.
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Pretreatment of Annotations and Document Linking: Although annotations are easily done on the fly, many attorneys prefer to pre-treat their document annotations - additionally, some may require being marked as confidential or redacted, etc. An effective feature of Trial Director is to link documents to appear during video testimony at key moments when that evidence is being discussed. This needs to be done in advance of next day's proceedings.
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Boards: It's inevitable that at midnight before a day in court, the lead attorney wishes to have a board created. Prior to arriving on-site, we will ensure that we have a board vendor in the area that can handle short leadtimes and around the clock support.
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Physical Exhibits and Special Needs: In the event a physical exhibit is used in court, often your hotseat operator will be involved in some way. There are often special requirements when presentating a case. We will work with your team in advance to plan for those. Examples include: using a lab grade digital microscope for an oncologiest, displaying the background code of a piece of software, connecting a gaming device the internet to demonstrate network protocols, establishing a cable television connection to view system program guide protocol, etc.