It has been quite some time since I posted anything here. Apparently all it took to drag me back was a term that has annoyed me for years: trial tech. I despise it, not because there is anything wrong with the technology side of this business, but because of what the term says about how the role has changed.
When I first started doing this work, the person sitting in the hot seat was more often called a trial consultant, litigation consultant or presentation consultant. That was not just marketing fluff. There was an expectation that you knew the case, understood the evidence and contributed something beyond knowing how to operate the software. You worked with the case team, helped organize the presentation, gave opinions and used your courtroom experience to help make the case easier to understand.
As more people entered the field, the market became increasingly competitive. In my experience, some companies competed by lowering the cost of the person in the courtroom. Along with that came a change in how the role was sold. Consultants increasingly became techs, and the expectations started to change too. A consultant was expected to bring experience and judgment to the table. A tech was expected to operate something.
The problem with that is the person sitting in the hot seat may be one of the most experienced people in the courtroom. A seasoned trial consultant may have been involved in hundreds of trials. Over that time, they have watched openings, direct examinations, cross examinations, expert witnesses, demonstratives, jury reactions and closing arguments play out case after case. They have also seen presentations fail, technology break, witnesses go sideways and carefully prepared examination outlines get tossed aside in the middle of testimony.
There are not many people on a typical case team who have accumulated that kind of courtroom experience. Yet somewhere along the way, that person became a tech.
Some companies have built much of their business model around being seen and not heard. Their person will sit quietly behind the monitors, wait for counsel to tell them what to display and otherwise stay out of the way. I understand why that can sound appealing, but I think it leaves a lot of experience sitting unused behind the monitors. There is a time to speak and a time to shut up, and anyone who has spent enough time in court should know the difference.
Knowing when to stay quiet does not mean you should have nothing to contribute. If I have spent weeks working with the evidence and I see a problem with a presentation, I am going to say something. If a demonstrative is confusing, I am going to say something. If counsel is about to spend fifteen minutes explaining something that could be communicated visually in thirty seconds, I probably have an opinion about that too. That is part of why you hired someone with experience.
The person in the hot seat should know the witnesses, the exhibits and the themes of the case. They should understand where an examination is going and be familiar enough with the evidence to anticipate what may come next. More importantly, when the trial suddenly goes somewhere nobody planned, they should have enough knowledge of the case and enough courtroom experience to react without needing every move explained to them.
Technology itself has become easier over the years. Courtrooms are better equipped. Lawyers are more comfortable with computers. Presentation software is easier to use. Hardware is cheaper and far more reliable than the equipment we dragged into courtrooms twenty years ago. If operating the technology were really the primary value of the job, there would be little reason to pay for someone who has spent twenty or thirty years doing it.
Getting an exhibit onto a screen has never been the difficult part of this work. Knowing what should be on the screen, why it matters and whether it is actually helping the jury understand the case is where the experience comes in. Sometimes that means a photograph instead of ten paragraphs of testimony. Sometimes it means zooming in on one detail. Sometimes it means blanking the screen and letting the jury listen to the witness. That is the part of the job I think gets lost when we reduce the person doing it to a “tech.”
There are plenty of very talented people in this industry who call themselves trial techs, and this is not really about them. My issue is what the term has come to represent. The role has gotten narrower, and technical proficiency is increasingly treated as the whole job instead of one part of it. Technology should support the work, not define the profession.