Lynn Packer's new article on courtroom presentation technology, The Case Against Courtroom E-Lecturns, emphasizes one of the reasons for my focus on information design as a skill lawyers must learn:
The legal industry has not only trailed other industries in its use of communication technology. It also lags far behind in content--in how words, photos, charts, sounds and video are created and delivered. Digital technology can help attorneys create and display content faster, cheaper, and clearer. But it cannot rescue bad content.
In my article last year on using graphics on legal writing, Beyond Words: New Tools Can Enhance Legal Writing, co-authored with graphic artist Karin Marlett (NYSBA Journal, June 2003, cover feature), I urged lawyers to adopt many of the graphical excellence principals from the works of Edward Tufte.
For trial presentation, however, many lawyers may start out using PowerPoint and Tufte has not been kind in his discussions of that tool (see my prior post Is PowerPoint a WMD?). Tufte's critcisms rightly teach us not to use PowerPoint's built-in formatting and graphic "wizards." But, as I've written before, PowerPoint can be used well (most recently see Antidotes for Toxic PowerPoint).
Further advice on how to avoid the specific pitfalls of PowerPoint raised by Tufte, but showing much more about how to use its strengths to create clear, persuasive visual presentations can be found in The Great Man Has Spoken. Now What Do I Do? A Response to Edward R. Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint," by Barbara Shwom and Karl Keller. (Found at Tony Ramos' blog.)
An underlying point shown in Lynn Packer's article on courtroom technology should not be missed: learning these skills is NOT optional. Lawyers who refuse to adopt technology tools are on a course to extinction. Communication tools and the skills to use them effectively should be top priorities.
Because, in the end, it does not matter how efficiently we use KM tools and techniques to gather, store, and retrieve information, unless we can form it into clear ideas and then communicate those ideas with equal clarity. That's why I take an end-to-end view of KM and include information design as a core component of the discipline.
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