Tobacco On Trial

All in all, the DOJ’s presentation seemed like a Microsoft product. Lumbering and bloated, it seemed to be doing an enormous number of things that it really didn’t need to be doing right now. They seemed to be hiding the forest behind the trees. Too many documents were brought up to illustrate too many non-essential issues. To illustrate a point, 5 documents were gone through one by one–and some were not particularly trenchant or rivetting– whereas just a single sharp document would have done the job nicely. Perhaps DOJ felt they had to spread the blame amongst the various defendants in particular, but it clogged the presentation.

I at first thought the physical presentation of the documents on large screens was very nice. The relevant text was highlighted in yellow; a cut-out and exploded version of just that segment was featured. You could easily read the excerpt, and get an vision of the document as a whole at the same time.

But as I tried to collate the documents with the DOJ’s arguments, I saw that they sorely lacked labels–there was nothing that clearly identified the originator or the year.

A label like this would have been helpful in every document:

1973
Wakeham
Philip Morris

This lack of identification made it difficult to fit the document in–was this an executive’s memo, a PR flack’s script, a brainstorming session, or what? At one point, Kessler interrupted (always a bad sign) and asked, “Where does this document come from? Is this a letter from an officer? What’s the context of what I’m looking at here?”

Maybe I’m spoiled; I’ve seen Anne Landman’s presentation of industry documents, and I’ve seen audiences follow her easily, involved and gasping all the way. I contacted Anne and asked if DOJ had consulted with her–it seems only natural to check with the one person in the country who’s making a living doing this kind of work–but she said no.

Maybe my unease came from the fact that the DOJ was preaching to the converted (heathen, too, for that matter), but everyone in the courtroom seemed to know most of this already. A snappier, more sharply focused presentation seemed in order.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 21st, 2004 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.