Example 6.5
Takeaway point 6.5: Don’t be afraid to use multimedia tools to help your client.
Including multimedia images such as photographs, charts, graphs, and video links in your Argument or Statement of Facts can help your clients in a wide array of cases.
Explains Judge Richard Posner: “Seeing a case makes it come alive to judges.” Suppose that your client was in a horrible car crash and received punitive damages. Including a photo of her — mangled and broken — after the accident might make an appellate court less likely to disturb the punitive damages award. Or suppose you allege that someone copied your client’s logo. Including photos of the two logos will help to convince readers that the defendant infringed.We see another situation below in which photos helped to build an argument. The passage comes from a Supreme Court case that addressed whether Texas could maintain a statue of the Ten Commandments outside its State Capitol. The brief reprinted below, which supported Texas, emphasized that the Ten Commandments appear on countless government buildings — including one that was especially important to this case.
Source: Amicus brief in Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677 (2005) (formatting adjusted).
The brief does not explain this term. The lawyers reasoned that the Justices could infer from the context (and from the prefix “dec,” meaning “ten”) that “Decalogue” refers to the Ten Commandments.
Notice that the lawyers build up to the most compelling photos. This approach deviates from the general rule that your best point should come first. Bravo. These lawyers correctly sense that brief’s brevity (eight pages) would prevent the Justices from tuning out. And the buildup to the final photos helps the brief end with a bang.
This example uses photographs to strong effect. As noted above, other visual tools can also be helpful to your clients. For instance, in the investigation and litigation about BP’s role in 2010’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the litigants prepared elaborate videos for the trial judge to explain how the massive spill occurred. (Example 7.4 provides some background about that dispute.)