God proposes but your lawyer disposes is a maxim that will be met with heartfelt acclaim among all Americans that are not members of the coldest profession, and as if the lawyers didn’t have all the money already, and a ready-made stage for their histrionics, they now want to make the law a major new branch of showbusiness: Litigation Sciences Inc has come up with a laser disk system that will give attorneys up to 54,000 electronic images to display on colour TV monitors installed around the courtroom, so that they can dazzle the jury and the gnarled ol’ judge with jazzy charts, documents, graphs, clips of videotape, photographs and even computer animation – at the stroke of a bar code reader wand; the system consists of a personal computer, video disk player, a bar code wand to read an exhibit index, one or more laser disks and several colour TV monitors facing the judge’s bench, jury box, plaintiff and defense tables and spectators – and it will clearly make US litigation yet hideously more prohibitively expensive, because if your opponents are using the system, you can’t afford not to roll up with your own multi-media presentation – and will have to demand a recess of a couple of months to prepare it.
