“What you have created is, for a visual storyteller, the canvas for persuasion."
Meet Bob Christie, a Washington State trial lawyer with nearly forty-five years in practice, over 100 trials to his name, and one of the earliest TrialPad adopters in the country. Bob spent decades building Christie Law Group before joining Baker Sterchi, where he continues to defend professionals, companies, governmental entities, and individuals in high-exposure litigation across state and federal court. His appellate work spans four decades and includes published opinions throughout Washington State, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and briefs to the United States Supreme Court.
Bob picked up his first iPad the year it launched and has used one, in his words, “every day, all day,” ever since. He tried his first case with TrialPad in 2012 and has used it in more than 30 trials, out of the 100-plus he’s tried over his career. He’s now in the final stretch of his active practice, and he was generous enough to spend an afternoon walking us through nearly fifteen years of lessons learned.
Bob’s relationship with visual storytelling in the courtroom predates the iPad by more than a decade. In 1996, he stepped outside his usual defense role to try a medical malpractice case on behalf of a friend whose baby had died because of a medical negligence issue. The heart of the case lived in a handful of specific lines buried in the medical records, and Bob needed a way to make those lines the centerpiece of his story to the jury.
At the time, that meant hiring a company to build custom callouts, burn them onto a disc, and print a sheet of barcodes that Bob would scan during trial to trigger them on screen.
“It was a game changer in terms of me being able to captivate the jury’s attention to specific words in an otherwise boring document that wouldn’t have sold the way they did if I would have just highlighted them or passed them around to the jury.”
The case ended in a record verdict for Washington State at the time. More than the number, Bob remembers the jury’s reaction afterward: they came up to his clients in tears and hugged them. It was, he says, the first time he understood the power of visual storytelling. TrialPad, when he found it sixteen years later, did the same thing his barcode-and-disc system did, except in real time, entirely under his own control, and without anyone else in the room.
Ask Bob what sold him on TrialPad and he’ll tell you it was never really about the software — it was about control. He wants to be the one revealing information to a jury, at the exact moment he chooses, because that is how cross-examination works: you ask the leading question, and you watch the witness’s face the instant they see what you’ve pulled up.
“I don’t want to put a third-party tech person in the way of the chronology, the way it comes out, the setup, the revelation of the information... The only way to do that effectively is to do it yourself.”
Bob has seen the alternative up close. A plaintiff’s attorney friend he trained on TrialPad years ago sent him a (bloated) transcript from an opposing counsel’s presentation. The lawyer had to talk his tech person through finding, scrolling to, and highlighting a single exhibit page, sentence by halting sentence. Bob’s version of that same moment is one tap.
That difference shows up in more than the jury’s attention. Appellate attorneys, Bob has been told more than once, appreciate how clean the trial record is when there’s no third party being talked through the technology in the middle of testimony. And in a federal court trial, when an expert witness tried to dodge a document by burying his face in a book, Bob simply pulled the exact page up on every juror’s screen and the witness’s own monitor and asked him to look up. The witness, Bob says, had nowhere left to hide.
Bob tries cases almost entirely paperless now, with one iPad running TrialPad for presentation, and a second running Notability for his own notes, and nothing else in front of him. He’s candid that getting comfortable enough to work that way took real effort, but he’s convinced it’s a compelling way to try a case.
Whether he needs a paper set at all is courtroom-dependent. Some judges have gone fully electronic and don’t want paper at all; others still want one, so he will keep a set on hand. When a document needs to be authenticated by a witness before publication, he’ll hand over a paper original with the exhibit sticker attached, get it authenticated, and then move the rest of the presentation back to TrialPad.
He tracks every exhibit’s status, offered, admitted, or not, directly in TrialPad, color-coded, so when the question inevitably comes up, he already knows the answer instead of flipping through a paralegal’s paper log.
“I know I’m correct on that because I’ve tracked it. It’s color-coded in TrialPad.”
For years, Bob treated himself as what he calls a “technology island”, bringing his own screen, projector, Apple TV, cords, and power strips to every courtroom so he’d never have to ask for anything. These days, most courtrooms are wired well enough that he doesn’t need to; when they’re not, he’s ready. He runs almost everything through an Apple TV, falling back to a smart TV’s built-in mirroring where it exists, or tethering to an HDMI cable in federal court, where he’s stuck at the podium anyway.
In a recent trial, opposing counsel offered to split the cost of a shared tech operator. Bob and his law partner, Megan Coluccio, declined. Bob only asked that some one show him where the projector’s switch was so that he could flip it himself, then connected his Apple TV and ran the entire case from his iPad. The optics of that, he says, are not a small thing.
“When you’re sitting there with two iPads on your desk and nothing else, the jury sees all that. They understand that you are in control of your world, and you’re in control of what they are visually seeing. That is a really powerful point.”
Eight Figures, No Wires
Bob is unbothered by the worry that running your own technology looks “too slick.” His view is the opposite. Jurors spend all day watching professionally produced visuals move across their own screens, and when they walk into a courtroom and get a wall of text on a PowerPoint slide, you’ve lost them. He tempers that with a deliberately mixed medium. He’ll still leave a physical poster board, often a timeline, standing in the courtroom for the jury to glance at while a witness testifies, rather than making every single thing electronic.
One of Bob’s most-requested presentations, delivered years ago at the Federation for Defense and Corporate Counsel, was titled “The Art of Presentation in the World of the Short Attention Span.” He opened it by playing a film clip from the 1960s — a single long take before any scene change — and then a rapid-fire sequence from one of the Bourne movies, to show the room exactly what today’s audiences are conditioned to expect.
“I think you need to give the jury a comfortable visual medium that they’re used to. And I think then they respect that you’re trying to engage them at their level.”
That philosophy carries all the way into how he manages a jury’s time. Bob tells jurors up front that he’ll keep it short and make it easy to follow, then delivers on it, even narrating how many questions he has left so they know exactly when the “movie” ends.
“I always tell my juries, look, I won’t take a lot of your time, but when I am presenting, please pay attention. I’m going to make it really easy... So don’t look away. I won’t be up here long.”
The payoff, he notes, is partly contrast: when the other side runs long and drives the jury quietly crazy, jurors physically shift toward the lawyer they’ve learned will be brief, visual, and done when he says he’ll be done.
If TrialPad is Bob’s presentation tool, TranscriptPad is where he says the real transformation happened. Before it existed, creating a synced video deposition clip meant either paying a vendor to build it or working through what he describes as the genuinely complicated process inside Trial Director. TranscriptPad reduced that to a tap: select the passage, hit create clip, and the clip comes out with the transcript scrolling underneath the video in sync.
“The ease of creation and the flexibility is so powerful. The syncing — how you guys figured that all out — brilliant.”
Bob described using that feature in a legal malpractice bench trial, where he played the same question three ways in sequence — what the witness said in an earlier deposition, what he said in the underlying trial transcript, and what he said in the current deposition — so the judge could watch the answer shift each time, while reading along with the synced transcript.
“Whether you’re hard of hearing, whether you don’t understand the accent, the ability to read the transcript under the video, like subtitles, I think is a great way you guys created that product.”
That capability changed how he handles depositions across the board. His rule now: any important deposition gets video recorded, and since so may are on Zoom, that recording comes for free. He’ll then send the client the top three clips from a deposition, the ones that help and the ones that hurt, so the client sees for themselves exactly what a jury would see rather than being told about it. He uses the same clips at mediation, and if the case goes to trial, he walks in, in his words, “locked and loaded.”
Bob doesn’t wait until the eve of trial to open the LIT SUITE. As soon as the key documents in a case start coming into focus, he creates a case file and begins building, using TrialPad as an organizational tool early on, then simply adding to it over the life of the case. His single most-repeated piece of advice is to change how you think the moment a file lands on your desk.
Bob doesn’t wait until the eve of trial to open the LIT SUITE. As soon as the key documents in a case start coming into focus, he creates a case file and begins building, using TrialPad as an organizational tool early on, then simply adding to it over the life of the case. His single most-repeated piece of advice is to change how you think the moment a file lands on your desk.
“If I start thinking visually from the first time a case comes in the door, that helps me. I’m a better visual learner than I am just being told a story. I want to combine what you’re telling me with something I can lock down visually.”
In practice, that means dumping documents into TrialPad on the first review, highlighting and building callouts as he goes, and saving those marked-up pages into a key-documents folder. By the time he’s done reviewing, he already has the essence of the case set up, highlighted, and ready to share, or to screenshot into a report. For Bob, this is also where the tool earns its credibility with a jury: he’s not asking them to take his word for anything.
“The document reveals the words. That’s why I’m saying them, showing them.”
Bob’s advice to lawyers just starting out with TrialPad is to resist the urge to do everything at once: pull up a single document and do nothing else. Most people can’t help themselves; they’ll pinch to zoom, try the pointer tool (and realize they are no longer shaking a laser at a screen, just touching what they want to emphasize), and within a session or two they’re comparing two documents side by side. Bob has used that side-by-side view for something as simple, and as decisive, as comparing two signatures.
His answer to any lawyer who never sets foot in front of a jury: do you ever present information to an audience where you need them to focus on specific words in a document? Of course you do. A callout and a highlight, screenshotted straight into a report or a client presentation, lands with people precisely because they don’t see that every day. It replaces the flat, fading highlighting most people are used to seeing cross their desks. Bob uses TrialPad the same way in depositions and hearings, not just trials, for exactly that reason.
“It makes static information visually compelling.”
Bob is candid that he spends most of his own time in TrialPad and less in DocReviewPad, a useful reminder that different litigators lean on different apps in the LIT SUITE depending on how their practice runs, and that’s by design. He’s leaned increasingly on TimelinePad, too, and is watching with real interest to see how AI organizational tools work their way into the organizational side of the LIT SUITE next.
When IT departments push back on tablets in the courtroom over security concerns, Bob has a ready answer, built from decades of watching lawyers walk into courthouses with banker’s boxes bungee-corded together and briefcases full of loose paper. An iPad, in his view, is a far more secure way to carry a case than any of that. He makes a parallel argument about the AI tools firms hesitate to adopt. You don’t need a closed system to use them well, and you need not put confidential information into them.
“You can probe AI to give you deposition questions of an expert on pathology and tracking tissue slides. Just ask it. You’re not putting any confidential information in there, you’re just asking questions.”
Bob’s closing thought captures why he’s spent more than a decade championing these tools to anyone who will listen:
“It’s a tool for anyone that wants to be persuasive. And that’s not limited by what side of the V you’re on.”
Whether you’re trying two cases a year or twenty, defending or representing plaintiffs, in trial constantly or almost never, Bob’s forty-five years of practice point to the same conclusion: if you present information to people and need them to remember it, the LIT SUITE is built for exactly that job.
Learn more about Bob Christie, Esq.:
Firm website: https://www.bakersterchi.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bob-christie-258b2a5/