Alexandria Company helps Lawyers in the Courtroom
By Angela Pfeiffer
It was 1996, and a ValueJet plane had just
crashed into the Florida Everglades, killing all 109 people on board.
Three years later, family members of the victims brought four wrongful
death lawsuits against the airline, and all four suits had been settled
out of court. A fifth suit was going to trial, and the plaintiffs’
lawyers had enlisted the help of a computer animation firm working in
legal support.
The firm was Animators at Law, based in Alexandria
on Powhatan Street. A team of artists and lawyers produced a computer
animation of the plane’s flight path and included dynamic graphs
that showed the plane’s altitude and airspeed. This animation was
synchronized to run with the cockpit voice recording, simulating the
crash.
In this case, the firm members who worked on the
animation had decided to recreate the terror of the crash because they
thought this would divert attention from the fact that one of the victims
was a waitress and single mother. They wanted the jury to think the
case was about fairness and justice, not money.
Animators at Law CEO Kenneth J. Lopez, said that
his company often thinks about painting the best face on a case for
the jury. For trials involving moral questions, such as the ValueJet
case, the firm brings in jury consultants. "They’ll say, ‘For
people to even hear our message we need to tell it to them this way,’"
he explained.
In fact, while the company provides presentation
support to lawyers for the courtroom, much of what Animators does is
figuring out what it will take for its client to win. "Our specialty
really has changed over time. It started out as animation for lawyer,"
Lopez said. "Now, we’re really translators. We translate things
that are interesting and understandable."
This may mean explaining something as basic as how
a computer works. "We’ve got to explain something to a jury,"
Lopez said. "We show them, ‘Here’s what the Internet
is, here’s how it works, I know you’ve never seen a computer
before.’ So we’ve got to start at that level and explain it
all from the ground up."
Hi-Tech Teachers
When Lopez stared the company in April 1995, the
firm did little consulting. The lawyers the company was working with
would direct the presentation strategy and form, and Animators would
create whatever they wanted.
More than two years later, the firm has 30 employees
and has expanded its services. "Now, we’re the folks who are
helping design strategy," Lopez said. "We’re hi-teachers.
We’ll help you teach it. And we’ve got some cool tools that
will help you do it."
Artists deign several types of presentation formats
including posters, videos and 2-d and 3-D interactive computer presentations.
They work at the direction of Animation lawyers, who design a strategy
for each case.
Hi-tech presentation does not come cheap. The animation
for the ValueJet crash, which cost $65,000, was actually less than the
average cost of Animators’ services, at $150.000. But Lopez said
the business is getting cheaper.
"Animation itself is more like a tenth of the
cost of what it was [in 1995]," Lopez said. "There are a lot
more people that do it, the hardware is out the, the software is out
there, and it’s just not quite as difficult as it was back then."
He doesn’t apologize for the cost of his company’s
services. "Lawyer-artists are a very, very rare breed," he
said. When clients started asking his employees to take on the teacher
role, Lopez said, their talents became especially unique. "There’s
a price for that."
If Lopez has pioneered in the animation industry
by bringing computer animation services into the courtroom, he has also
pioneered in the business world by foregoing venture capital.
"In the very beginning, I was convinced that
venture capital was something we absolutely had to have. That’s
because we had no money," he said. "I eventually got to the
mindset that it was much more important to control the destiny of the
company and create the vision for the company. That became a lot easier
when we got a lot of clients."
When Lopez talks about controlling the company,
he means creating its culture — a culture where people enjoy what
they are doing. "We could today surely go out and get venture capital
and grow really fast, even faster than we are right now. But I think
that’s sort of a frightening prospect.
"Right now, I and everyone else that works
here own almost all of the company. To give half of it up to somebody
else just wouldn’t seem right to us. We’re doing great and
we’re passionate about what we do. We would hate to take the fun
out of it."
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©1995-2003 Animators at Law, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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Animators at Law
National Headquarters
814 King Street
Alexandria, Virginia 22314
800.337.7697
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