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Developing memorable expert testimony: you can turn your expert's dry technical testimony into a powerful teaching tool. Using PowerPoint slides to reinforce key points of your direct examination will help the jury understand, and remember, what your expert is saying.

Article Excerpt
A seasoned and successful trial lawyer once told us: An expert is not going to win your case for you, but he sure can lose it." The products liability crashworthiness cases that our firm typically handles are overflowing with expert witnesses: accident reconstructionists, design engineers, biomechanists, medical doctors, economists, life-care planners, fire cause-and-origin experts, the list goes on. You can find an expert for pretty much any issue in your case--the problem is, we often do.

We put highly educated experts on the witness stand for days at a time to discuss complex principles that even we do not fully grasp. Then we expect a jury, most likely including several people who have not attended a day of college, to understand what the expert is saying, apply complex principles to the facts of the case, and find in the plaintiff's favor.

Twenty-eight percent of American adults have bachelor's or postgraduate degrees, which means three-quarters of the jurors we seat have received considerably less education than our experts. (1) While we value and appreciate the collective intelligence of our juries, we must ask: How do we bridge this knowledge gap?

One way is to use visual aids--like PowerPoint presentations--that supplement and reinforce the expert's testimony. This is the age of television and visual media, and people get most of their information from television.

Television communicates both audibly and visually; in learning, information that is both seen and heard is better understood and retained. (2) Jurors are used to receiving information this way, so it can only help us to add these elements to our case, including during direct examinations of expert witnesses.

Focused focus groups

Typically, expert witnesses have no shortage of topics and issues that they think they should explain to the jury. Your job as a lawyer is to focus the jury's attention on what is really important to winning the case.

This is particularly difficult in products cases. How can a bunch of highly degreed lawyers and experts who are intimately involved with a case...

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