The Incredible Shrinking Attention Span

I recently came across an article in the New York Law Journal discussing how the crisis of shrinking attention spans is affecting juries. Unfortunately, I was not surprised to read that “a goldfish retains interest in a stimulus longer than the average Internet user.” The New York Law Journal article, titled “Are we Boring Juries to Death?”, discusses how many industries have adapted to the population’s shorter attention span. For example, commercials are shorter, TEDX lectures are under 18 minutes, and big companies like Microsoft employ shorter “bursts” of training instead of long sessions. The legal system, however, has not evolved like these other industries. Trials are not purposefully under 60 minutes as a way of retaining juror attention. In fact, as the article points out, it is almost impossible for the legal system to adapt for a few reasons:

•  the judge is required to explain points of law to the jury and the jurors are required to undergo a “crash course” in the law before deliberating. 
• Trials to begin with are very complicated for jurors, who must learn difficult points of law to a level reasonably comparable to that of the legal professionals in the room. 
• Jurors must listen to hours of evidence and testimony and, in the case of “white collar crimes,” they need to learn complicated subjects like insider trading and cybersecurity.

This is all to say that as our attention spans whittle away to nothing, the average juror is struggling to stay afloat. So how do we keep the new, modern jury, in whose hands our liberty and security lie, engaged throughout a trial? Well, this article in The New York Law Journal proposes 

• “charging the jury contemporaneously with the evidence” because the added context might hold their attention more effectively
•  this would work by giving large amounts of information both before and after a lengthy trial. It can be difficult to retain this much information and adding context to instruction usually makes things easier to remember. I think this is definitely an idea worth exploring!
•  A piece in Precise proposed using animations as a way of bridging the “information retention gap.” I had never heard before of using animations in trial. 
• I assumed that some visual tools may be using in evidence, such as the layout of a building where a crime occurred or pictures of an injury, but reading “animation” surprised me; however, I think it is a genius idea. According to the article, animations are admissible if “validated by expert or witness testimony.” https://trial.precise-law.com/attention-spans-modern-jury/. 

This is an example of an illustration of a vehicle accident that I found online. 

I think that increased use of techniques used in the business world can be very helpful in adapting the legal system to the modern world of short attention spans. After all, part of what has created short attention spans is looking at thousands of images on the internet (namely social media) everyday for several hours. Why, then, should lawyers not use images to anchor the jury to the details of the trial? And if people in the everyday world need instruction contemporaneous to an assignment, why not employ this in the legal world? 

What are your thoughts? What other methods do you think may be effective?