The more I am called in to help attorneys with jury selection, the more I realize their money may have been spent better elsewhere. Am I advocating that having a consultant attend voir dire is a waste of money? Absolutely not. But unless you are skilled enough at conducting voir dire, you may not be able to elicit the attitudes from jurors that your consultant needs in order to guide you as to which jurors are good or bad for your case. I have attended one too many voir dires where the attorney was confusing, wasting much of their limited voir dire time trying to re-explain themselves to the jurors who sat with furrowed brows or failed to nail down cause challenges thereby losing multiple opportunities to make their peremptories go further or asking questions in a format that elicits only the politically correct answers.
Here is my suggestion. Gather 12 people and bring them into your office. They don’t need to match your venue’s demographics because you don’t care what they say, you only care that you have bodies to practice on. Pay them in pizza. Have another attorney play judge and try to rehabilitate your jurors after you set the grounds for cause challenges. And finally, have your consultant there to critique you during the process. Practice staying on schedule, getting jurors to talk to one another, getting jurors to give you “bad” answers, and getting jurors to strongly commit to cause-challenge answers. Don Keenan and others have been suggesting this, but I know not nearly enough attorneys are doing it because I am at all of your voir dires!
I would much rather send an attorney into voir dire prepared and without me than to be unprepared and have me there but not elicit information I need to be helpful. If you have the budget to do a voir dire focus group and have a consultant at voir dire, by all means, do both. After all, the focus group should only take a few hours. But if it’s one or the other, I would STRONGLY suggest using your consulting budget on voir dire practice. Besides, it will pay off not only for that case, but for any future case. That is money well spent!
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