The Settlement Brochure, sometimes called Demand Video, is most accurately known as a Mediation Documentary, as it focuses on the coverage of liability and damages and is presented during a mediation proceeding or arbitration hearing. The finished piece is from 10 to 30 minutes in length, never longer, and is a concise summation of the case. This video is produced to get the opposing counsel or insurance company to fully recognize the pain and suffering from a catastrophic injury or death stemming from negligence, malpractice or product liability.
The Mediation Documentary never sees the inside of a courtroom: yet, by its vivid and very graphic nature is an incredibly valuable and often indispensable part of a mediation process leading to the favorable settlement of a case. Mediation Documentaries are advocacy video and all the stops are pulled to advance the case for liability and damages. The video content is produced for maximum emotional impact. Every method that can be employed to heighten dramatic tension and deliver the emotional punch is engaged. Dramatic lighting, fancy editing, special effects, dramatic background scoring, dramatic voice-overs, professional actors, title generation, fancy camerawork, emotional shots, graphic shots, chroma keying, stock footage, computer generated animation, image treatments - and the list goes on - are all deployed.
Mediation Documentaries are full-blown professionally produced videos with the plaintiff's counsel in the director's seat. This is precision, very slick video documentation and the effort to produce it on a defined timeline is highly sophisticated. As with any professional production, the shooting schedule is carefully planned, often stripped out in Day-Out-of-Days and the production meticulously scripted for optimum efficiency, economy and effectiveness.
A legal videographer can go into fact-finding mode, working in consultation with counsel and legal assistants to assemble the elements of the case and comprehensively target coverage. A certified legal video production team may coordinates with the scheduling of interviews, organizing all exhibits and material that will drive the presentation.
A legal video production company may script and storyboard the production for the counsel's approval, provide on-location coverage, go into the post-production phase with the same attention to detail, providing professional editing, professional graphics enhancement, professional color correction, dramatic scoring critically timed to the cuts, computer generated animation, encoding and authoring. The finished settlement brochure is a very polished demand video and powerful summation of the case.
Source by Howard Brodsky