Trial Magazine

Can you tell the story of your case in two minutes or less? Just like attorneys, filmmakers must quickly make a lasting impact on audiences with increasingly short attention spans. Their tool of choice is a movie trailer—a two-minute visual story that aims to persuade an audience to see the two-hour version. This critical first impression shapes how an audience will feel about a story and how people will act on what they see.

To create a compelling visual case synopsis:

• Start strong. The first moments of any communication are the most critical, and if you have a crisp and compelling story to tell, you’ll be able to direct the story and frame the case the way you want.
• Front-load the key information. By signaling the core structure and getting the key facts into your jurors’ minds quickly, you’ll anchor those points before the detail begins to overwhelm their attention.¹
• Heighten emotional impact. People make decisions intuitively and emotionally, then justify them rationally.² Reason and facts are the foundation of your case, but don’t neglect intuition and emotion.
• Accelerate and deepen their understanding. A picture can tell a thousand words, but the right picture used the right way is worth a million words. 

The next time you have an opening statement or another important presentation to deliver, try creating your own version of a two-minute movie trailer as your introduction. In PowerPoint, select “New Slide” on the “Home” tab, and choose “Blank.” Repeat this to create a total of six blank slides. Next, select the “View” tab, and choose “Slide Sorter” to view the blank slides as shown below.

This is your storyboard: the visual storytelling tool that you’ll use to display your images on a large screen behind you as you narrate your two-minute story. As you view all six blank slides at the same time, think of them as the frames in a filmstrip: The first slide is the beginning, slides two through five are the middle, and slide six is the end.

What are the most interesting and salient images you can choose to help guide your story from one frame to the next? Will it be a photograph, a logo, a smoking-gun document, a medical illustration, or a stock photograph? You’ll likely find most of these images among the case exhibits, and locate additional images on Google Images or stock photography websites with appropriate permissions.

As a general rule, fill the screen as much as possible with an image, and keep text to a minimum. Give yourself the freedom to use any image you like in the first draft, and edit later to accommodate what you’ll be able to use in court. 

To get started with your visuals, try using a basic verbal outline for what each slide should accomplish. Here is an example using a fictional medical negligence case.

• Slide 1: Set the stage. “June 23, 2015. Houston, Texas. A mom goes to the emergency room after she slipped and broke her leg.” (Although 99 percent of this story will be about the defendant, front-loading the first 1 percent of the story with a relatable human drama like this creates a powerful emotional backbone that strengthens the narrative that follows.)
• Slide 2: Introduce the main character (the bad guy). “Little did she know that she arrived in the middle of a shift change, and that X Corp., the corporation that owns the hospital, did not follow the rules to put a system in place to make sure that records were correctly kept through the shift change.”
• Slide 3: Set up the conflict. “The nurse who admitted the patient gave her a powerful dose of a drug, but X Corp.’s system failed, and the computer system did not properly record the procedure.”
• Slide 4: Describe the action. “X Corp.’s failure meant that the new nurse on shift did not know the first nurse already had given the drug and proceeded to give her a second full dose. In minutes, the drug began to destroy her organs and led to a heart attack and loss of oxygen to her brain, destroying her body.”
• Slide 5: Explain the impact. “X Corp. took away a wife, a mother, and a daughter.”
• Slide 6: Provide the hook. “X Corp. is responsible for failing to follow the rules and leaving a mom in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Let’s take a look at how it all happened.”

Now go to “Normal” view to insert a photograph or a screen capture of a document on each slide that will tell the story at that point. Once all six slides have images, return to Slide Sorter view to review the visual story from one slide to the next as shown below. Next, go back to Normal view, and write out the narration in the “Notes” text box below each slide.

When you’re done, connect a projector to your laptop, select the “Slide Show” tab, and under “Monitors,” select “Use Presenter View.” Now when you click “Start Slide Show,” you’ll be able to view the notes on your laptop while your audience sees only the slide.

Try out your first draft of your movie trailer with people unfamiliar with the case. Ask them whether it made sense and whether anything wasn’t clear. Ask them what images they remember. Incorporate the feedback, and swap out photos if needed or tighten up your narration.

Making a movie trailer for your case is an art that takes time and effort. With this simple start, you can make a blockbuster impression on your jurors.

Cliff Atkinson is a communications consultant in New York City. He can be reached at cliff@cliffatkinson.com. 

Notes

1. Patricia D. Mautone & Richard Mayer, Signaling as a Cognitive Guide in Multimedia Learning, 93 J. Ed. Psychol. 377 (2001).
2. Antoine Bechara, The Role of Emotion in Decision-Making: Evidence From Neurological Patients With Orbitofrontal Damage, 55 Brain & Cognition 30 (2004).