Visualizing Legal Argument

This looks like a fun conference: Graphic and Visual Representations of Evidence and Inference in Legal Settings. For reasons that shouldn’t be all that hard to figure out, over the last couple of years I have been increasingly interested in the way lawyers assemble and understand information. Especially with complex litigation, the amount of information that needs to be organized and sorted is enormous, and often is coordinated with large numbers of people, with little overlap of experience or knowledge, being paid a great deal more than the average wage. It is, in short, the ideal environment for effective knowledge management tools. And of course, there are a number of companies that provide support for them, but there are also enormous opportunities for helping lawyers come to terms with large amounts of data quickly, and be able to transmit this information to a jury and others.

I actually interviewed with a company that consults in this area, and was surprised by the shallowness of their thinking in the area. Attorneys are willing to go to experts, but it seems that a fair number of the people who consult in these areas (jury consulting, graphic communication & visualization, and supporting evidence collection and organization), while certainly providing a service, could be doing so much more.

That’s not really what this conference is about, but I’m interested to see what is happening on the research side of things. Luckily this conference, on the 28th and 29th of January, is free to the public here in New York at Cardozo Law School.

(I’m sure someone deserves a hat tip here, but I don’t remember how I found it!)