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If your visual strategy starts when the trial does, you've already given up ground.

In Depositions Are Trial, Sach Oliver makes the case that the deposition isn't a warm-up - it is the trial. The visuals you'll rely on in front of a jury shouldn't debut at trial; they should be woven into the case from the very first deposition until they become what he calls "the visual culture of the case." Build that culture, and judges grow more receptive, the defense is the one forced to adjust, and your story takes root long before opening statements.

Sight is the through-line. As Oliver points out, almost every piece of evidence a jury weighs has a visual element - and you decide much of what they see, when they see it, and how. The question isn't whether to use visuals. It's whether you're building them with intention from day one, or scrambling for them the week before trial.

That's what we do at Fox-AE. We build trial graphics and litigation animation that turn complex facts into something a jury can see, understand, and remember - and we help attorneys weave them in from deposition through verdict, so the visual culture of the case is working for you long before you walk into the courtroom.

Because the story a jury can see clearly is the story they carry into the deliberation room.

A teaser from Track 11 of The A.M.P. Method: "The Album Art."

If a juror can't grasp your slide in three seconds, it's too busy.

Lomurro's rule for trial visuals: design for absorption, not display. The brain can't read a wall of text and listen to you at the same time - so it picks one and drops the other. Either way, you've lost them.

The fix isn't more on the screen. It's less. One anchor. One frame. One sentence that tells the jury exactly where to look. Good design doesn't rescue a weak case. It makes a strong one impossible to ignore.

Pre-order The A.M.P. Method + 11 free demonstratives: https://buff.ly/S5TgTCA

In 1847, an Irish engineer named Oliver Byrne did something almost no one had tried: he taught geometry with barely any words.

Instead of "let angle ABC equal angle DEF," he used color. Red, yellow, and blue shapes stood in for letters and symbols, turning Euclid's proofs into diagrams you could follow with your eyes instead of decode line by line.

His bet was simple - a picture can carry an argument that words can only describe.
It flopped. The color printing was so expensive the book priced itself out of the classrooms it was built for. But nearly 180 years later it's considered one of the most beautiful books ever printed, and a direct ancestor of modern information design.

He wasn't wrong. He was early.

And that idea is the whole reason our work exists: when something complex is hard to follow in words, the right visual lets a jury see it - and understand it - in seconds.

Source: Oliver Byrne, The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid (William Pickering, 1847).

There's a moment in every trial when you lose the jury.

The head tilt. The slow blink. The look down.

In The A.M.P. Method, trial lawyer Jonathan Lomurro explains what's really happening: you've overloaded them. And when jurors can't follow the evidence, they don't default to the fair middle - they default to skepticism.

The defense wins in that fog.

Your job isn't to impress them with the volume of information. It's to find the one frequency that resonates.

Not argument. Resonance.

🎸 The A.M.P. Method: Anchor, Modernize, Persuade - Jonathan Lomurro

Most trial lawyers treat a deposition as round one and save the real performance for trial. Sach Oliver's argument: there is no round two.

In Depositions Are Trial, the Arkansas trial lawyer and CEO of Oliver Law Firm lays out the philosophy he's used to win catastrophic-injury and trucking cases across the country - prepare and run every deposition as if the judge and jury are already watching. That means real strategy, deliberate word choice, witness storytelling, and courtroom-grade visual aids built before you ever sit down at the table.

That last part is exactly what we believe at Fox-AE: the picture you put in front of a witness and later, a jury - is what makes testimony land. Sach has been making that case from the deposition chair for years.

Whether you're trying your first case or your hundredth, it's worth a spot on the shelf. Print and audiobook (read by Sach himself) at 📘 depositionsaretrial.com.

Saddle up! 🤠

Depositions Are Trial by Sach Oliver Personal Injury Lawyer Sach Oliver brings a personality and style to depositions and trial that the profession has never seen. Saddle up.

FUN FACT FRIDAY 🦊

"The man who invented the pie chart was a spy."

William Playfair, an 18th-century Scottish engineer, gave us three of the charts the modern world runs on: the line graph and bar chart (in his 1786 Commercial and Political Atlas) and the pie chart (in his 1801 Statistical Breviary). He built them because he thought numbers in a table were boring, and a picture would land harder. He was right.

He was also a British secret agent. In 1793 he ran a counterfeiting operation aimed at collapsing Revolutionary France's currency - one of history's first attempts to take down a nation by attacking its money.

Two centuries later, the espionage is a footnote and the charts are everywhere. The principle behind them hasn't changed: a clear picture makes the argument!

Source: William Playfair, The Commercial and Political Atlas (1786) & The Statistical Breviary (1801); Bruce Berkowitz, Playfair (2018).