As judges begin to recognize video's streamlining effect, they are allowing more video than ever into the courtroom. Video depositions, document management and imaging, remote appearances, camcorder-generated evidence, animations, reconstructions, "day-in-the-life" videos, and tutorials describing complicated technology can provide besieged jurors with information in a way that holds their attention, increases their retention, and magnifies their general comprehension.
Joshua Reichek and David McMurray are on the verge of revolutionizing this legal video market; their company, Legal Video Services, has developed two new products in response to the explosion of courtroom video use by the media.
The first product, already on the market, synchronizes video depositions to their written transcripts. But it's Legal Video Services's other product that promises the real revolution. To demonstrate how it works, senior design engineer McMurray strikes a bar code, and a full-color, high-resolution document pops up on the screen. Displaying this image using the best system currently marketed would take roughly 4 Mbytes of storage. Legal Video Service's system, ILS (Integrated Litigation Solutions) Paint, can do it with 50 or 60 Kbytes, depending on image density.
Typically, when a lawyer goes into court, he or she might have up to a couple hundred fully prepared, fully treated, 1-Mbyte-a-piece documents ready for display. Current systems allow for some simple in-court manipulations of documents: zooming in on an area of interest, or maybe rotating or highlighting it, but not in full-color and high-resolution. ILS Paint, however, allows lawyers to handle tens of thousands of documents automatically. They can do it in the courtroom, in real time. If the "shadow jury" research shows that a blue background is not working, they can change it on a thousand documents with one wave of a bar-code wand. If a juror is having a problem reading the documents, using ILS Paint, lawyers can blow them up, automatically, in glorious high resolution 24-bit color.
An ILS Paint system that handles hundreds of thousands or millions of documents will run between US$100,000 and $150,000, co-principal Reichek says. This includes a Sun Workstation with around 100 Mbytes of RAM. Legal Video Services expected to be in initial beta testing mode in the first quarter of this year. The system should be on the market by the end of 1995.
Legal Video Services: +1 (510) 836 1111
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