What to wear to jury duty? - Page 5

As far as I'm aware (and I'm still new to this whole lawyer thing), lawyers don't get too many chances to evaluate prospective jurors. Jury trials are pretty rare.

How many of those myths are actually typical litigators' practices, and how many are straw men being broken down by a consultant as an exercise to show off their supposed insights? Jury consultants can help sort out a lot of issues, but they don't have a foolproof plan, either. I've worked with some great trial lawyers who hate jury consultants, and others who like to use consultants. I've had in-house attorneys tell me that they will always budget for a trial consultant in large cases, but do so mostly to get the benefit of focus groups (and probably CYA) rather than on-the-fly assessments.



Well, that was kind of outside the scope of this thread, which started off simply asking about how to dress for jury duty. It's also a bit too large of a subject to address in this context. It's not overly simplistic to say that you listen to the potential juror's answers to voir dire questioning, then try to figure out whether those answers reveal biases on issues that are key to the case. The real trick is figuring out which issues you are screening for, and how to balance what appear to be countervailing biases on those issues. As lawyerdad says above, the same person can be a nightmare juror in one case, and a dream juror in another one--it all depends on the issues in the case.