Anchorage firm rolls out a high-tech courtroom
Company also provides practice courtroom
ANCHORAGE - An Anchorage firm is helping put high-tech equipment into the state's courtrooms - and even provides a courtroom of its own to practice in.
The service, called TrialWire, is owned by Downtown Legal Copies LLC, a long-established company that has been making copies for lawyers for many years.
"We wanted to take Downtown Legal Copies to the next step in helping attorneys," said TrialWire manager Shawn Williams. "We wanted to provide full-service litigation support."
These days, that's a lot more than making copies. It includes equipment from laptop computers to flat-screen plasma TV monitors and software to control them. Williams said the goal is to make documents and testimony easy for attorneys to find during a trial, and then to present the information in a way that's understandable to judges and juries.
Williams said Doug Lowry, the owner of Downtown Legal Copies, set up TrialWire only after being assured that several of the largest law firms in Alaska would use the service.
"We knew that if we built a courtroom and offered trial presentation software, they would come," Williams said.
The primary reason was cost, since until TrialWire opened its doors, any lawyer wishing to go the high-tech route would need to import all the equipment and people to run it from Outside at considerable expense.
TrialWire officially opened its doors Sept. 1 and is being used in two trials, one in Fairbanks and one in Kenai, Williams said. The company is preparing two more cases, both in Anchorage, and has had to turn away business, he said.
"I'd been hearing about electronic presentation software ever since the Exxon Valdez trial, but I was scared off by having all sorts of new things to learn," said attorney Kneeland Taylor, who has a private practice in Anchorage. "It turned out to be easy to learn, and it was not very expensive compared to what lawyers put into trial preparation."
Taylor said he paid about $2,000 to TrialWire to prepare his case. Williams said costs vary widely, depending on how many exhibits are needed and how long the trial lasts. About half the cost is for rental equipment and half is for document preparation.
Preparation consists of converting paper documents, videotapes and audio recordings into digital files, which are loaded into the trial presentation software.
Every item is given a bar code and can be displayed by running a scanner over a thumbnail representation of the document prepared in advance by the TrialWire team.
Williams said that team consists of four people who have experience in scanning documents, preparing computer graphics and digitizing audio and video clips.
The other half of TrialWire's business is renting out rooms. One is a conference room suitable for depositions; the other is a three-quarters scale mock-up of an actual Anchorage Superior Court courtroom.
The room can be rented for $450 a day by attorneys wishing to practice their trial presentations, or to go over testimony with witnesses so they are more comfortable when the real trial takes place.