One of the great challenges of litigation is to make yourself understood in a succinct and efficient manner.

If the goal is to be succinct, efficiency is lacking: short texts tend to suppress explanations that may be crucial to understanding the judgment.

If the focus is on efficiency, we fall into the abyss of ‘exhausting the facts and the law’: long pages to make sure everything is there, exhaustively explained to the court.

In the search for real situations, we investigated processes that involved long and complex discussions and came to two conclusions:

• The written form is sometimes not enough for the reader to fully understand the case, especially if it involves a technical issue that is outside the scope of the law. Imagine a debate about the cement production process in which the chemical modification of some items in its composition is decisive for the discussion about tax benefits. How do you explain the moment in the production chain when this element changes? How many pages (and complex vocabulary) would it take to explain this issue to a legal expert? Certainly many…
• The essential and usual formality in the legal environment often inhibits creativity in developing new ways of dialoguing with the judiciary. Petitions and orders, when insufficient to clarify a matter, should be enriched with other forms of communication.

When we came across the scarcity of other ways of communicating with the Judiciary, apart from those already known and indicated in the law, we took on the mission of developing a format that could contribute to procedural speed, clarify complex issues in a clear and objective way, ensure efficiency in the transmission of information without displeasing those who prefer liturgy.

Some data guided our activities, such as the level of retention of the information[1] according to the format used:

10% of information is retained when transmitted in an oral presentation

35% in the case of a visual presentation

65% when a visual and oral presentation is used.

In addition, 72% of judges point to the excessive number of pages as one of the biggest problems in petitions today, which shows that changing the language is necessary, especially if we consider that the judge’s activity depends on understanding the controversial issue in a context of exponential growth in the number of cases.

After gathering some possibilities and insights generated by our Technical and Innovation Teams, we looked for a concrete case to test our perceptions.

In the selected lawsuit, the validity of the summons was discussed in an independent lawsuit which ended up “holding up” the central issue of the case. In other words, the object of the lawsuit, which was the plaintiff company’s real pain, was put to one side until this debate was resolved.

By then, 344 days had passed since the lawsuit was filed: several petitions and countless in-person and oral orders had been made, but none of the attempts had been enough to convince the court of the need to review the matter and debate, once again, the grounds that led to the mistaken decision.

In the case of motions for clarification addressed to the Court, we added a resource developed by our Innovation Team: storytelling, putting the crux of the matter into easily perceptible images.

The storytelling replicated the same narrative, the same facts and the same arguments as those already presented in the various petitions and orders, but from a new perspective.

By putting our suggestion into practice and applying storytelling to the specific case, we made it possible for the Court to reopen the discussion and understand an essential point of the case that was not being well understood despite all our efforts. Our objective was achieved.

The excellent response not only to the case presented, but also to other cases developed by CHENUT, confirmed the importance of exploring new communication formats to turn negative results into positive ones.

[1] Source 1:”Presenting Effective Presentations with Visual Aids,” U.S. Department of Labor, OSHA Office of Training and Education, May 1996.