(Reuters) - In a typical trial, the lawyers are the stars of the show, holding center stage with soaring rhetoric or withering cross examinations.

And somewhere in the shadows are the trial consultants and graphics wizards who help make those performances possible.

In the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, that critical behind-the-scenes role was played by DOAR. Working pro bono, experts from the trial consultancy firm helped the House managers present a powerful, albeit unsuccessful, case against the 45th president for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

"For a firm like ours, in some ways, it was a dream opportunity," Paul Neale, the CEO of DOAR, told me. "We had license to think outside the box, and to really choose evidence from thousands of hours of video footage."

While demonstratives are important in just about every trial nowadays, evidence including cell phone videos, security camera footage, social media posts, speech excerpts and animated maps played an outsized role in the impeachment.

Because this was not an abstract fight over contract language or intellectual property rights or market monopolization - or for that matter, soliciting help from Ukraine to smear a political opponent.

This was people scaling the Capitol walls and breaking glass and beating police officers. In many ways, the visuals were the case.

Chief impeachment counsel Barry Berke, who rejoined Kramer Levin as a partner and co-chair of the firm's litigation practice on Feb. 17, told me that one of the first calls he made after signing on to serve as lead counsel to the House of Representatives in the Senate trial was to DOAR.

Berke said he's tapped the New York and Los Angeles-based litigation consultants for assistance with every trial he's had in recent years (including the first impeachment, when DOAR also worked pro bono), recognizing that jurors accustomed to spending hours each day staring at their phones or computer screens respond to visual storytelling.

A flip chart on an easel doesn't cut it anymore.

Trump's second impeachment offered an extraordinary richness of material to draw from. "So much of the evidence involved video, not just of the attack, but prior speeches and statements," Berke said.

For DOAR, one challenge was how research, acquire and edit so much footage - with one notable exception. Neale said the firm did not work on the 13-minute video that kicked off the trial.

DOAR's contributions included creating the 3D model of the Capitol that showed how the rioters entered and moved throughout the building, as well as developing summary charts, presenting social media posts and news footage.

Berke said DOAR demonstratives were also used to convey evidence that was too cumbersome to dive into at trial, such as a map showing all the election challenges that Trump and his allies lost in courts across the country.

Pulling it all together was an "iterative process," Berke said, as he and other lawyers including House Judiciary Committee oversight counsel Sarah Istel collaborated with DOAR staff on demonstratives until (in some instances) "minutes before we used (them)."

That's not surprising, considering the team had less than a month to prepare the case, from when the House on Jan. 13 voted to impeach Trump to the start of the Senate trial on Feb. 9.

"Usually when we enter a trial, the evidence is locked down," Neale said. But here, "evidence was literally being created during trial."

For DOAR, the impeachment was an all-out effort. A half-dozen employees "dropped everything" to work on the case, Neale said. "We jumped in with both feet."

Neale told me that DOAR's business has taken a hit in the pandemic. The kind of trials they typically advise on—massive civil disputes with millions of dollars at stake—are not ones that would be tried via Zoom.

Moreover, most of their cases are litigated in New York or California, and courts in both states have been slow to re-open for in-person proceedings.

According to its website, DOAR provides services including mock trials, jury selection and witness preparation for firms that have included Wachtell; BakerHostetler; Morvillo Abramowitz; Mukasey Frenchman; Willkie Farr; Covington & Burling; Epstein Becker and Baker Botts.

With several trials scheduled this spring in the Southern District of New York, Neale said DOAR's work is rapidly bouncing back.

"Clients still want to invest in their cases and get feedback, even if they don't know when their case is going to trial," Neale said. "Otherwise, we'd have had very little to do."

But it also meant DOAR staff had "more bandwidth" to tackle the impeachment. In retrospect, Neale said he is "overwhelmed by the impact of the evidence presented and the story that was told," he said. It's "a part of history. It hasn't really sunk in yet how momentous it was."

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