How Storyboards Helped Win a Multimillion-Dollar Verdict

A recent case Cogent Legal worked on highlights how storyboards can be a great option for your case presentation.

The name “storyboard” comes from animated movies where the entire plot of a movie is made in images, generally drawn by hand, representing six-second intervals of the action for the entire movie. Joe Ranft, formerly head of story at Pixar before his untimely death, was a master of the storyboard, and here’s a tribute made by the Pixar folks after his death using the storyboard format as a memorial to him.

I had the great honor to represent Joe’s family in his wrongful death action some years back. Ever since that case, I’ve realized the power of simple images to tell a story and that storyboards can be as effective (and sometimes more effective) than an animation. Additionally, storyboards inevitably cost less than animations, since doing a storyboard is generally the first step of an animation, and then a significant amount of time (and money) is spent actually animating and rendering the concepts. I also have found that storyboards are easier to get admitted into evidence, since judges see them as simply helping explain expert or witness testimony. (See prior post on detailed discussion of admissibility issues for California cases.)

Cogent Legal developed storyboards for a recent case represented by a good friend of mine, attorney Steger Johnson, and his case highlighted the value of storyboards for trial. (See below for examples from the case.) (more…)