CBA Record November 2015

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46 NOVEMBER 2015
LPMT BITS & BYTES
BY CATHERINE SANDERS REACH
A Tale of Two Presentation Styles
Catherine Sanders Reach is the
Director, LawPracticeManage-
ment & Technology at the CBA.
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Lawyers have long used Microsoft’s
PowerPoint to provide visual dis-
plays to support a live presentation
during CLE programs, for client meetings
or to communicate with a jury. Slides are
also used to convey information in an easily
digestible format, and sent as standalone
communication devices or displayed online
on sites like LinkedIn SlideShare. Over the
years the expectation of a professional look-
ing slide deck has gone from aspirational
to assumptive. Expectations demand that
slides are lean, graphic, and high impact. In
firms with a graphic design and marketing
department a lawyer can often get help, but
what can a lawyer do on her own?
Live Presentations
Slides should help you make your point.
Try to find images and words that help
viewers understand your point. The
number one sin, ok probably number 2
(#1 is misleading with charts), is reading
from your slides. If your slides have no
words, you can’t read them. A slide doesn’t
replace the need for the audience to listen
to you. A slide filled with words guarantees
an audience will read the slide and not
listen to you.
Getting Graphics
It is important to use high resolution
photographs and graphics in your slides,
and equally important that you have
permission to use them for commercial
purposes. Many paid sites, such as Fotolia,
Shutterstock, and iStock by Getty Images
ensure you have access to thousands of
high quality images with permission to use
them. Here are a few sites to get quality
graphics for free.
• Unsplash Free,
high resolution photos. Search and
download. No attribution necessary.
• Free
stock photos, no attribution, no copy-
right. Includes a free (while in BETA)
graphics editor called Snappa.
• Morguefile
com/. Free photo archive of high
resolution stock photos. In some cases
photographers request attribution, so
check the details for the image. Adapta-
tion (editing) is also usually allowed.
While Google and Bing have advanced
image searches that let you filter for graph-
ics that are free for commercial use, be sure
to do a reality check because the filters are
imperfect.
Occasionally you may need to capture
images from your computer screen. Snagit
($50 for a single user) from TechSmith lets
you capture screenshots or specific portions
of you screen, as well as blur, annotate and
edit them. All of your clips are saved to an
image library on your computer for reuse.
Creating Handouts
If your slides have no words how can
you get your audience to read the case
summary, the language of the contract or
other clauses that often find their way into
lawyers’ slide decks? You can use the notes
fields to add content to your slides, thus
appealing to the folks who want words so
they don’t need to take a lot of notes or
if they want a quick version of a longer
handout.
The easiest way to accomplish this is
to put notes, suitable for sharing, into the
slide notes field. To add bullets, hyperlinks
and other formatting you can convert the
slides to MS Word and edit as necessary.
Alternatives to Microsoft’s PowerPoint
While people have long used Microsoft
PowerPoint, plenty of alternatives are
available that let you create more fluid, or
more graphically pleasing or just different
presentations. You’ll need to practice.
• Prezi . Free if every-
thing you do is public and you want to
present online. Otherwise $13.25/mo
to be able to control privacy, get image
editing tools and work offline. Designed
to work with touch screens.
• Keynote
keynote/. For Macs only, although you
can get Keynote for iOS if you want to
create and display presentations from
your iPad. Keynote is $20, and is very
good for editing graphics and has pretty
templates. “Works seamlessly” with MS
PowerPoint, though that is not entirely
true, anymore that moving from one
design in PPT to another is completely
“seamless”. A reality check is necessary.
• Google Slides
slides/about/. If you have collaborators,
this is perfect. Create, edit, share, and
present online for free. Not a ton of
templates, but you can convert PPT
to Slides easily. It doesn’t have all the
bells and whistles of PPT, but enough
for most people. Just like in PPT, don’t
forget right click menu options.
Presentations for Passive Consumption
Lawyers often send information in slide
presentation format because it is an easy
In PPT 2010
File–Save and Send–Create Handouts–Create
Handouts inWord–Notes below Slides
In PPT 2013
File–Export–CreateHandouts–CreateHandouts
inWord–Notes Below Slides