How to Reduce the Costs of Legal Graphics

All lawyers have to balance costs with effectiveness. This not only applies to the visuals but also: 1) if an expert is hired?; 2) If a mock trial is needed?; or 3) etc. It is a tight rope to walk on, but when deciding what demonstratives to develop, cost becomes a factor. Some attorneys will only invest in an animation if the case is of a certain value. Some attorneys may make the decision to not print any boards if the insurance policy that is available has a policy limit of $10,000. Other attorneys are worried about the costs that will be listed in their client's closing statement at the end of the case.

Regardless of why you are concerned with the costs in your case, there is a way to reduce the costs of legal graphics, demonstratives and other visuals. Here are some tips on how to keep the costs associated with your exhibits at trial down:

a) Try to have a sketch ready of the graphic(s) that you are looking for prior to meeting with your graphics designer. We know that artistic talent ranges from person to person but any amount of pre-design means our designers do not have to do it.

b) If you have documents blow-ups, have them ready and highlighted. Place them into a separate folder titled "Call-outs" or highlights. This makes it clear for our designers and printers. In facts, if you only have documents that need to be blown-up with highlights, rather than have one of our team members go to your office, (which costs time and money), email the documents to our office.

c) If you want to have a multimedia presentation (power point slide presentation), create an outline on word of the text that you want in each slide. Of course, there will be some edits and additions that the designer may put in, but at least the critical information that you re looking for is in the slides. The outline should refer to any documents that you want to include in the slide.

d) Depositions - If your want to make trial exhibits that call out certain portions of a deposition, please have ready the deposition, page and line. Give us an electronic version of the deposition to make the design/highlight quickly to use less designer time.

e) Be ready to be INVOLVED. As the attorney, the more your are involved the less correction, alterations and adjustments have to be made. If our only communication is with your staff, something may be lost in translation. This means that more corrections, edits, etc. may take place which cost more in the long run.

APVisuals has been involved in providing quality legal graphics to the South Florida legal community for over 15 years. We know how to be the most effective and efficient for our clients. If you are headed to trial or mediation and are in need of demonstratives for your case, please call us to discuss. We look forward to hearing from you.