Making Evidence Legible to a Jury, How NAEGELI Deposition & Trial Builds Trial Exhibits in Tacoma

An exhibit is an argument in visual form, which means a badly built one argues badly. A timeline carrying nineteen entries in eight-point type communicates that the case is complicated and almost nothing else. Trial exhibits in Tacoma have to be understood from the back of a jury box, on first viewing, by someone who has never seen the file.

NAEGELI Deposition & Trial has supported courtroom proceedings since 1980, and its trial presentation staff work with documents, photographs, graphics, video, and animation, from design through organization.

What Separates a Working Exhibit From a Cluttered One?

Restraint, usually. One idea per display, a visual hierarchy that puts the point where the eye lands first, and type large enough to read at a distance. Everything else on the board competes with the thing counsel wants noticed.

Callouts carry a lot of the load. Pulling one clause out of a contract page and enlarging it beside the full document shows a jury where to look while keeping the source visible, which lands better than either the whole page or the isolated clause on its own.

Why Does This Matter in a Pierce County Courtroom?

Cases here lean technical. Port and industrial matters turn on equipment, procedures, and sequences of events; construction disputes depend on plans and site conditions, and medical evidence arrives as imaging and chart entries. None of that explains itself through testimony alone.

NAEGELI Deposition & Trial in Tacoma works from 1201 Pacific Avenue, a few blocks from Pierce County Superior Court and the Tacoma Municipal Courthouse, which shortens the distance between a change made the night before and the courtroom where it is needed at nine.

How Do Video and Animation Fit Into a Presentation?

Deposition video does work a read-aloud transcript cannot. A witness contradicting earlier testimony registers as a moment rather than a passage, and video synchronized to the written record means a clip can be located by searching text and exported for use at trial.

Animation handles sequence and mechanism. A chain of events, the operation of a piece of equipment, or the layout of a work site is easier to follow as a diagram that builds than as a paragraph of testimony describing it. A display that looks expensive invites a jury to wonder who paid for it, which is not the question counsel wants them holding.

Physical exhibits still earn their place. Boards, enlarged prints, and models do not fail when a projector does, and a document handed directly to a witness carries different weight than the same page displayed on a screen behind them.

Timing shapes what is possible. Exhibits built early can be tested against the order of proof and revised after someone unfamiliar with the case looks at them, while a demonstrative assembled the night before rarely gets the second read that catches the error a jury would notice first.

What Has to Exist Before Design Begins?

Exhibits come from material already processed. Documents arrive scanned, OCR processed, and Bates stamped so the version on screen matches the version in the transcript and the binder, and transcript summaries with a full word index identify the passages worth pulling. Design work built on a disorganized set inherits the disorder.

What Else Comes Out of the Same Operation?

Presentation sits at the end of a longer chain. Court reporters cover depositions, arbitrations, hearings, and trials with daily copy, expedited transcripts, and real-time reporting available; remote depositions run on secure platforms with technical staff on each proceeding, legal transcription converts audio and video recordings into verbatim text, certified interpreters work across more than 200 languages and dialects, and copying and scanning produces trial binders with tabbed indexing.

Marsha J. Naegeli, CCR, CMRS, CRI, founded the company and continues to lead it as president and chief executive. Production runs through the Portland headquarters while presentation staff, reporters, and videographers work locally in Tacoma, and scheduling runs around the clock, which matters most during a trial week when nothing stays on the calendar it started on.

Jurors are not the audience counsel rehearsed for. They arrive without the file, without the vocabulary, and without two years of familiarity, and the exhibit either accounts for that or it does not.

NAEGELI Deposition & Trial

1201 Pacific Avenue, 6th Floor

Tacoma, WA 98402

(253) 565-4400

(800) 528-3335

schedule@naegeliusa.com