Focus Groups with Guest Lucas Foust
None of us are smart enough for our audience to even remember anything we’ve ever said. They’re not going to remember anything, but they will remember how we made them feel. Hence, having that sixth sense is what separates great attorneys from the not-so-great.
While you’ll never be able to figure jurors out, you can always at least get a better idea of what is going right and what is going wrong in the cases you’re handling. If you’re interviewing and you want to have a positive result in anything, you should have some background or understanding of that audience.
In today’s discussion, I’m joined by Lucas Foust to talk all about focus groups, the different focus groups they’re using, and how using them has become a valuable resource.
In this episode, you will hear:
- Their process of running focus groups
- The value of figuring out your hits
- The power of using videos in focus groups
- The benefits of running virtual focus groups
- The impact of using checklists
- Valuable time vs. busy work
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Supporting Resources:
Lucas Foust
Website: https://www.lucasfoustlaw.com/
Episode Credits:
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Episode Transcript:
Elizabeth Larrick: Hi there. Elizabeth here. Just want to pop in real quick before this episode gets started to give you a quick introduction for our guest, Lucas Faust.
Lucas and I met several years ago when I was working with Mr. Keenan, when we were doing a lot of reptile seminars. And you will hear us talk a lot about Mr. [00:01:00] Keenan and his method of doing focus groups. Lucas practices out of Bozeman, Montana. He’s done personal injury pretty much his whole entire career.
And a fun fact about Lucas is he is a referee for basketball games. So he knows how to call both ways. So I hope that you enjoy this episode. If you want to reach out to Lucas for any reason, or if you have something in Bozeman, Montana, his contact will be in the show notes. Please enjoy. Hello, and welcome back to the podcast.
I’m your host, Elizabeth. And for this episode, we have a treat coming all the way from Montana. Lucas Faust is joining us today. And we are going to talk about focus groups and a little bit of things that Lucas and I do together. So hello and welcome to the podcast.
Lucas Faust: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.
This is great.
Elizabeth Larrick: Awesome. Well, I wanted you to come on the podcast because I know that you love focus groups and you do them a [00:02:00] bunch and you even started your own focus group company kind of like I did. So walk us through, tell us about how you got started and what really piqued your interest in doing more.
Lucas Faust: Well, really the big thing was, I remember an attorney one time explained to me that You will never figure jurors out. You’ll never figure people out. And I kind of took that on as a challenge saying, I think I probably can, or at least get a better idea of what is going right and what is going wrong in the cases I’m handling.
And that started the process of getting introduced to Don Keenan and the pioneering work he did on focus groups has, you know, Constantly evolving and we’re always learning more as this process goes. But I started off running a few focus groups and my wife, Heather, and I started a organization called, or a business we called Seventh Amendment Productions, named after the Seventh Amendment of the U S Constitution.
And it does a couple of things, having a separate business entity from my law firm. I had to find [00:03:00] a way to literally pay people. And that sounds like a silly thing, but if you’re going to pay folks for their time, you can either do it with cash or you can do it with checks. And I didn’t really want to send checks out in the community from my law firm’s operating account.
It just seemed like a much easier way to do it. I could charge the business, could, Cut its own checks, 7th Amendment productions. Those are essentially consulting folks. And we started the process of having our own little business. And really over time, what Heather was able to do, she became very adept at gathering people, finding out where regular folks frequent.
And we started off, Heather started off by just finding folks on Facebook. She entered every. Garage sales site. You could imagine every small town that there is out there and found really just regular people who would. look and sound a lot like a potential jury. And we started from there and she built her bank of people up from there.[00:04:00]
Elizabeth Larrick: And so what do you use them for? Cause I know there’s people in the audience who sometimes we use them for getting ready for trials or maybe just for mediation. So walk us through what you use them for.
Lucas Faust: I have a system for the focus groups and for focus groups and how we use them. I will not file a lawsuit until I’ve done at least one and usually two focus groups.
That’s a rule in our office, unless there’s a statute of limitation issue or something and that’s the exception of the rule. But as a rule, I don’t even want to take that case if it’s that late in the process. If it’s two and a half years out, we have a three year statute of limitation in Montana, I’m not going to get involved usually.
But with that very slim exception, we will run a first initial, what we call a narrative style focus group. And what I’ve done over the years and in large part, thanks to Mr. Keenan, his law firm that I’ve worked with on several occasions, we have basically a set standard of questions that we ask in our First Narrative Focus Group.
And those questions are consistent. The reason that they’re consistent is because I can compare [00:05:00] One batch of focus groups to another batch to another batch. And if you’re asking the same questions, you can compare what type of person is going to be more receptive to your case, to your situation or circumstance.
And over the years, I do a lot of construction site litigation where people are seriously injured on a construction site. And because of the type of case that we have, we found people who are excellent demographics for that type of case. You want construction workers. You do not want their spouse. Okay.
Their wives are terrible, terrible jurors because their husband would never get hit by a concrete boom. That would just never happen because he’s Jason frigging Bourne. He’s Jason Bourne. And he would have done a backflip somersault to avoid the situation. Usually the injuries are real serious and they cannot imagine or picture their husband getting hurt like that.
And I can’t blame him. That’s just a natural survival instinct. But you learn. Yeah. Yeah. What types of demographics kind of fit? So we’ll start a case off. We’ll do a narrative style focus group. I’ll do that [00:06:00] sometimes to decide whether or not I’m interested in taking the case. You can get a lot of feedback.
One of the first things we look for is the Keenan Law Firm calls negative attribution. So you have people who will blame your client for their unfortunate circumstance. And ironically, we found that the more seriously someone’s injured, The more likely they are to blame the person for their own injuries.
It’s kind of a defense mechanism we have as human beings. Setting all that aside, one of the things that happens is you develop a basket of information you develop from people. So there’s some generalities, but nothing beats trying your focus group out because your focus group members change over time, et cetera.
But we start with a narrative style focus group. I may run two or three of those. That’s the first group we do that gives us a pretty good idea of just generally where folks are standing right now and we asked the focus group members to assign responsibility, who’s responsible for it. We asked them what their gut check is, what else they would want to know, why they decided the way they decided regarding that.
And it’s impressive how [00:07:00] typically I run a case in about 30 minutes. That’s all the time it needs to get our narrative style focus group. So when we go to the trouble of putting a focus group together, we’ll sometimes run three, four, and even five cases. To one group. So, that’s the typical first step we take.
And then there are any number of types of focus groups. You can let your imagination run wild with them. But the biggest thing is this I’ve discovered over time how surprised I usually am with focus groups. They come back with answers like, Whoa, where’d that come from? And the biggest thing about focus groups that I’ve taken from this process is Somewhere along the line, during my legal education, all of the common sense between my ears was completely sucked out and replaced with a process of looking at a case that is wholly and completely different than the general public.
So, I’ll have friends ask me, what do you think about this, let’s say, hot in the news right now is the Donald Trump indictment. They’ll ask me about that. And my common response is, [00:08:00] Understand that some lawyers put that together. What’s more important is what do you all think? Because there’s a real disconnect and that’s really why these are so necessary.
Ultimately, if you’re interviewing for a job, you should know about the company. If you’re interviewing and you want to have a positive result in anything, you should have some background or understanding about that audience. You don’t know what you don’t know. So you just have to simply ask folks and you’ll get Feedback.
That’s what we found. So,
Elizabeth Larrick: yeah. I also, one of the things that you said that always strikes me when I do focus groups and working with lawyers is they always say, wow, we just, we learned so much and I’m like, absolutely. And the other thing is I always tell them, and what assumptions did you hear? you didn’t say anything a assume they’re like, oh, So, you know, it’s the ho maybe know were there or they just create things i you just never would have I have
Lucas Faust: learned over time In the way of their [00:09:00] cases, more than anything else, if you have a very good case and you know you have a good case and you know that the facts are shaped up in a way that’s going to make your audience upset, the surefire way to make your case a good case, turn it into a terrible case is to get in the way of the damn thing and tell people what they should think.
One of the things I was fortunate enough to attend Jerry Spence’s Trial Lawyer College in 2015, I took a few things away from there. One of the things I took away is this, none of us are smart enough for our audience to ever remember anything we’ve ever said. They’re not going to remember anything. They will remember how we made them feel.
And that’s a completely different part of the brain that this is used. And that’s the disconnect that we have. We are so smart. We think we’re so brilliant as attorneys. It’s not the case. Okay. The attorneys who are really good have a sixth sense of what is going to make people feel a particular way That’s what I found over time I have to do it with focus groups because I don’t [00:10:00] have the same gene that Jerry Spence does to Be an amazing trial lawyer, or maybe Mr.
Keenan or whoever the trial lawyer might be, but there is a way to find that. There’s a, well, there’s a way. And those are their focus groups get you there.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. And I think overall as a profession, we are intellectual workers, we are knowledge workers. That’s what we were paid to do. That’s what we are, like you said, trained and that’s what we look for.
And then we start working and that’s what our brain molds to. And those are our habits. And so going back to that emotional. Thing the 14 inches from here to here from brain to heart, right? Sometimes really hard to do, but sometimes it’s so easy to make those quick emotional decisions. And that’s what jurors do.
And we’re just blown away. Like I just spent four years working and putting this together and they just dumped it in a heartbeat. And it’s like, yeah, and you would rather be dumped in a focus group any day than at the courthouse.
Lucas Faust: And you’d rather be dumped in the first two weeks of the case that you’re thinking of taking on than you [00:11:00] would in two and a half years later after all the time and energy and money that you’ve ever spent.
And you’ve, one of the things about it, I see attorneys all the time say, gee, I’ve got this great, brilliant expert. He or she is so smart. Oh man, they’re so great. The only expert you really need to know and really be familiar with is your focus group, your audience. What is the general public going to say about that case?
Because chances are They’re never going to remember anything about anything that the expert says. They’re not going to remember it. They’ll go back and they’ll tell you how they feel and until you know how they feel, you’re kind of at a loss. So we start early. We do them often. There are a lot of things that are really convenient about doing multiple focus groups at one shot.
You go through all, it keeps the cost weight significantly down and you’re able to save on that. And that’s, to me, it’s an invaluable process. It’s something that we absolutely do every time and don’t wait. That’s the key. Have it set in your checklist of stuff you do before you file suit. Get a couple of those in for [00:12:00] sure.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. So talk a little bit about once you file, because sometimes I’ve talked about in this podcast and with other people, sometimes people want to do one after they have some depo transcripts or some videos to do the players, folks, group players, some people I find love to do it like right before the depo, they’ve gotten some written discovery, but they really want to know what would a juror want to hear, from this corporate rep or from this supervisor or this driver.
So tell us a little about what other places that you like to do a focus group.
Lucas Faust: No, absolutely. We’ll do them. Everything you listed is something that we consider before a 30B6 type witness, that type of stuff. Usually you found most of the stuff. If you do a narrative self focus group before you file, you found that out.
But if you have filed, it’s not the end of the world. Just stop what you’re doing and really think about going in the right direction because A couple of things that happened. I take my discovery. I take my focus group information and I’ll turn them into discovery requests. [00:13:00] There are things that they want to know documents that I never thought of that are important to my potential audience that never occurred to me as important.
I’ll use them for that. I will use them. Boy, I will use them after a deposition. And there’s a whole process. I’m at the Kenan Trial Institute now. I teach hit lists at the program. And one of the things we’re doing now is in our hit list, the program that we’re doing is you ask folks whether you got the point across that you were hoping to get.
You’re able to take video clips, figure out, make sure to see if you got the hit, see if it made sense. And. That is one of the things that is amazing to me is just how high the bar is. They expect us to be Jerry Spence and it’s like, holy cow, really? I mean, I’m doing a heck of a lot better than 90 percent of the guys that people that I’m out there with, but you, they really have a high expectation of being able to really pin that person down or do it properly.
So figuring out your hits, whether you get them or not. On the back end of this process is absolutely invaluable. [00:14:00] Then when you do your cross examination at trial, it just is, it falls right into place. You’re going to either get it, not get it, whatever that might be. You have the video clip to back it up, all that stuff.
I no longer take a deposition without a video. I mean, I can’t imagine doing that anymore because. That’s so useful for focus groups. If for no other reason you take the clips, see if you got them, that type of stuff. As the case moves forward and down the line, we do safety focus groups. We’ll do a focus group asking folks, Hey, how could this have been made safer?
How should it have been made safer? Those are the types of literally we’ll spend 20, 30 minutes just talking about that and they’ll come up, these folks, they’ll come up with some, every time I’m impressed with what their thoughts are.
Elizabeth Larrick: So
Lucas Faust: I use them there. I’ve had people approach us asking about. whether they should claim a certain particular type of damage and I had a guy ask me, he said, I’ve got a client who was injured.
She got shot in the leg. Okay. Bad injury. It has impacted [00:15:00] her work in the adult entertainment industry. Should I bring that as a damage? So great question. And I was like, I don’t, man, I’m telling you, I think this is not a good idea. This are going to really nail her. The seven focus group members we had virtually to a person said, Oh yeah, no problem.
The most adamant of this, I’m sorry, I was nine, the most adamant of the nine people. was the Christian bookstore owner. As long as it was not illegal, he did not care because his point of view was different than I thought it would be. His point of view was not self righteous. His point of view was a lot of countries, I couldn’t do what I do.
I appreciate that. So he was a hundred percent on, Hey, it’s not illegal. Knock yourself out. Right. So I thought that was fascinating. So I was, again, they always surprise you that you never, you’ll get interesting questions and I was chastising the guy and I was embarrassed afterwards saying I could not have [00:16:00] been more wrong about this.
Elizabeth Larrick: And sometimes that’s the fun part is to say, you know what, I was wrong, but thank goodness we actually asked some folks who would have to answer the question. So, well, you mentioned virtual and I know that you’ve been doing focus groups before the pandemic and we had the switch. So tell me a little bit, are you going back in person at this point?
Are you sticking with the virtual? Walk me through that.
Lucas Faust: Well, with the exception of getting ready for a trial or doing preparing for a voir dire, which is kind of an interpersonal situation, I really encourage people to practice their Regular folks and see how the flow goes. It’s critical. We’ve been doing them virtually almost exclusively and what we found are a couple of things.
First, folks really like the convenience. They’re able to get home from work. They watch it. They show up more often. People don’t bail. There’s nothing that physically gets in the way. They’re already home. They don’t cancel on you. And when we were doing them live, we would get 15 people and hope 10 would [00:17:00] show up.
That’s kind of where we were. Now we get 12 people expecting at least 10 will show up and it’s convenient. I will say this. This is, I have found this as well. People actually pay more attention. It seems crazy, but we all, we have been, since we were little kids, just. Hunker down in front of a television. So we actually pay more attention to a screen than we do to the other in a room where there are other distractions.
So that’s the virtual, I’ve found people to be more attentive because there are many more distractions in a room that you don’t think of, like clock or the look at what the person’s wearing over here. I mean, that type of stuff, it doesn’t happen on a, on a screen. Also, they know you’re looking at them.
They know that you can see them. They know that if they doze off or whatever. You can see them. That’s their faces right there at one time.
Elizabeth Larrick: I also love this aspect of it, which is I use Zoom and I think you use Zoom as well. Zoom has really upgraded many, many, many times since the pandemic started. And now, [00:18:00] which they always had like the gallery view.
What I love is. If you’re doing something long, like you’re doing an opening statement. And when I say long, like that means you’re having to talk to these people for 10, sometimes 20 minutes, right? It’s great. Cause you know, when they stop paying attention, because the screen is so close, you can literally see.
And if you’ve done any virtual, when someone has turned on a TV because the flash of the light or when their eyes are down or what, so it’s like, Oh, that part got really boring or you need to do some, you know what I mean? Like, so it. It’s helpful, even in those senses of when we’re looking at the content piece, but also like, okay, you lost them.
Like what happened in that moment? Because everybody went somewhere else because when you’re in person, it’s really hard to get that close up. Our cameras are good, but sometimes I feel like having that camera right there virtually, you really get to see that reaction.
Lucas Faust: And the chat section is invaluable.
That chat bar is something that Everybody, no problems with it. They’re [00:19:00] brutally honest, especially, I mean, you can set the chat bar up. So other people don’t see what they have to say. And they know if the other folks are seeing it, these are really what that’s really what they’re thinking. It’s kind of automatic.
And exactly like you said, you can see when you lose them, they’ll tell, they’ll tell you, they’ll be brutally honest about. that part of the process. So it’s a little more challenging when you run a focus group for your opening statement. You don’t want to run your own focus group for your own opening statement.
We do those very early on. If I have any chance at all, I have my, I will run a focus group for my opening statement before I file suit. That is a rule in our office. We have two focus groups. We do a narrative, at least one narrative, and then at least one opening statement, and your opening statement’s ready to go.
And that may sound crazy, like, oh my gosh, how could you do that? Well, you know your case already. You know kind of what you want to say already, and how it’s set up, and if there’s no reason you shouldn’t be ready to do an opening statement. Some things will change. They won’t be exactly the same. You’ll have new facts pop up.
Good, bad, ugly, but you have a pretty good idea where it’s going to go. [00:20:00] Or you shouldn’t be filing suit.
Elizabeth Larrick: Well, and I would say, let’s give a little background here, Lucas. And that would be, one, having known you for many moons now, like, your practice itself, to me, just again, as an outsider, like, has really significantly changed because you’ve, I’ve seen you take less cases, but also, like, Again, we’ve all learned from Don Keenan, the checklist of all these things to do, the investigations, the interviews that we do before filing suit that so many lawyers, because we’re bogged down with so many cases, can’t do that.
So I think to fill people in like, You do a whole heck of a lot of work before getting to that filing point, just in the file research and investigation and experts and making sure pieces are in place before filing. And if there’s other stuff that I’m missing too, that you guys do, but that’s definitely one of the things I would say, as far as a little bit of background that I think really helps people know, and you tell them, [00:21:00] like, has that been a good thing for your practice?
Lucas Faust: I went from a caseload of over 30. I have eight cases now, and on a high it’ll get to 10. My wife is my paralegal and there’s a very simple rule in our office. When we get to 11, she will walk upstairs and she will ask me, who are we gonna fire today? Because at 11 you’re a jerk. And at 10. You’re okay to deal with.
8 is better. 10’s okay. 11, you’re done. There’s a saturation point. But I will say this, one of the things that learning all this stuff that I went out really worked hard with the Kenan Trial Institute and took all the colleges, really worked my tail off, my income’s tripled. I mean, it just does. You take fewer cases, you’re more selective.
And maybe it’s just one of the things is this, I have a kind of a set parameters for cases that I take. If you’re a large law firm and you have 30, 40 lawyers, You’re going to take the automobile crash cases that are 20, 30, 000. I can never handle those. Or you’re handling workers compensation cases in a large volume.
Your business [00:22:00] model needs to, if it doesn’t fit this, it doesn’t make any sense to you. But for what I do, I’m a solo practitioner. I have a set number of cases. When I get a case and I have set it up like this, I am ready to try the case. When I file suit, I can try it within 60 days. Period. I’ve got my experts.
Everything’s done. I have 24 things that I have to finish before I file suit. And if you’re disciplined and do that without, even though you don’t want to do it, I mean, you don’t want to do your case selection criteria memo. Just do it. Just get it done. If you’re disciplined and you don’t want to do your hit lists.
Where’s my hit list? But if you’re disciplined enough to do it, it will absolutely, a little stress now will save you a ton of stress in the future. I’ve gone from 30 cases down to about 8 to 10. And cases that I thought would, well, the first case I had with Misha Keenan’s firm, I thought it would be maybe valued at 3 million bucks.
That’d be great. It’d be a great resolution. We settled for 8. And that happens just because of the way I work the case up. 100%. [00:23:00] So you’ll spend more time, but it is per case. It is more valuable to do that. We have a whole process we go through. It’s maybe more relaxed. I’m not stressed out. I’m not putting out 35 fires all the time.
I’m more selective with my clients. I have a tighter relationship with them. Even kind of the weird guys I hang out with, I know their families really well. And, uh, yeah, so it’s been career changing, cutting down. Less is absolutely more. You make more money. You can learn to say no. One of the things I’ve done is this.
I say no so much now that I actually, I have a guide for people. So if the case is worth under a hundred thousand bucks, I literally tell folks, you don’t need a lawyer. The carrier is not going to treat you any differently. So if you’re going to get a lawyer, I mean, seriously here, just there, you can figure a lot of this stuff out yourself.
Here’s a guide. I’m going to send you a guide, figure this out yourself. You don’t need me charging a third of that. And I get more people that comment and are thankful for that, that you can imagine. So they’ll maybe get a 50, 000 car [00:24:00] crash settlement and they didn’t have to pay anybody anything.
Elizabeth Larrick: So, because.
Lucas Faust: It’s laid out in the guide. So
Elizabeth Larrick: I appreciate you pointing that out too, that like, there are people who the business model is just set up differently. And, but I think most of the people that are in the audience are like you and I solos or have a medium sized firm with just a few lawyers. But one thing that you said that just want to repeat, which is that there’s maybe more time on each case, but the value it’s valuable time.
It’s not just busy work. And I think sometimes as lawyers, we can get caught up in the busy work, especially if you’re a solo or have one partner, because we have so much to do in the business and on the business. So it’s easy to get caught up with that, but having that valuable work that you’re doing.
And sometimes, like you said, you just get it done and it’s done. You don’t have to do it again. You just get to go back and look at it and be like, Oh, that’s right. Okay. Now write the
Lucas Faust: memo. If you don’t want to sit down for an extra 30 minutes, but write the stupid [00:25:00] memo, it stays in your file. You will forget it.
I guarantee you, you will forget it. The other thing I’ve done is this too. I work with people who are smarter than me and better organized, which is a really low bar for me, but the people that are smarter at, I have an appellate counsel that I go to. And that gets the case out of the left side of my brain completely.
So if there’s an appellate issue on a substantial claim, I just send Jonathan in, Jonathan, here you go. This is what the deal is. Answer this, reducing my caseload and then getting help in that area has been a tremendous, I mean, I could do it. I was a law clerk. I think the judge, I mean, I was a law clerk at the state Supreme court.
So I know, I know how to pellet stuff goes. I just don’t like it and I’m just not, when you don’t like it, you’re just not as good at it. Yeah. And that’s been me. So fine. I understand. Well, you will always excel at what you like to do. It makes it so much easier. And that’s what I’ve learned over the last five, six years really has been changed things for me.
So.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, absolutely. And we talked a little bit about this earlier [00:26:00] about why you set up and that was the, your own focus group coming just to keep things separate. Right. Absolutely. And that’s taken off. I mean, that has, it’s made its own world now. So tell us a little about that. And I just want to make a little comment here to put a little pressure here on Heather.
We’re going to have her on the podcast so she can come talk to us about it.
Lucas Faust: She’ll be voluntold that she’s going to be on the podcast. There we go. So the business, you’ll all get to hear an opportunity to hear about Heather’s business from her, what she does, kind of the nuts and bolts of it. And I would encourage you to have your paralegal or whoever your support person is to, to come Manage this and listen, Heather set up the business and she actually is hired all the time by other law firms.
And when I say all the time, it hardly a month goes by where we don’t have a two or three law firms. And this is in Montana with a very small population, just in Montana that are asking Heather to run a focus group. And I’ve learned to let them go and do their thing because it is what it is. It’s very bizarre sometimes what they think they need to get, but let them [00:27:00] go, but you have different processes for it.
So she’ll either set the group up, let you do it. She’ll set it up, run it herself. She’ll set it up and then have me handle the focus group. There’s different packages that she has. But that alone has been a business model for Heather. It’s not a tremendous amount, but it’s worthwhile. It’s worth doing. And it’s been extra income for her and she hasn’t, you know, She can just tell me, um, she reminded me, maybe she does better than me in a month.
There you go.
Elizabeth Larrick: Well, and I think half the battle is the system and the system takes time to set up and work the kinks out. And I think that’s where a lot of times, cause we talk about on the podcast, like I have lots of DIY stuff, but sometimes it’s like. That is a whole like other thing to set up and I’m sure as you’ve experienced, you can do it a different way.
You can group it together. If you have bad participants or you have a group that is just full of people who aren’t from the U S which has been [00:28:00] happening or people who they just got off their last focus group and they’re just going to tell you whatever the next person said. Oh yeah, I agree with that.
Like, oh yeah, people don’t actually tell you anything. They just are there to collect the dollars. It is so helpful to have that system to kind of avoid those pitfalls. The
Lucas Faust: nice thing for when you’ve built a bank that Heather has, Heather has, I think, a seven or 800 percent bank when you have in different communities, I don’t care where the focus group members come from personally, I mean, I just don’t there as an occasion, if there’s an issue in.
I’m bringing a claim against the Yellowstone Club. So I’d like to know what folks in Gallatin County think about the Yellowstone Club folks. If it’s that specific, yeah, maybe I want to get some, but otherwise it doesn’t matter where they come from. I don’t care so much, but I’m more concerned about demographics, like ages and work, how they’re going to interpret the information they take in.
On a construction site case, but Heather keeps track of those folks. And she has somebody that becomes a crummy focus group. And there’s no good call back. Just takes them off the list.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah.
Lucas Faust: And they don’t, they don’t come back.
Elizabeth Larrick: We call it the no list,
Lucas Faust: [00:29:00] no list. And what’s interesting, we still save our, it’s kind of falling out of fashion with the Keenan law firm, but.
We still save our shit happens, superstars, the people who you never can convince it. We have a repository of them. And at the end of the case, if I get to where I can convince those folks, then we’re going somewhere. So we know people are really good, tough focus group members. And that’s so, so we keep track of it.
Oh yeah, that’s hurt. He’s going to be terrible. We know that from the get go.
Elizabeth Larrick: I mean,
Lucas Faust: not on my case, somebody else’s, Oh, he’s going to be bad. This’ll be good. Cause he’ll be bad. Yes.
Elizabeth Larrick: Awesome. Well, is there any, we’ve kind of covered the gamut. Is there anything recently when I mean recently past year where you were in a focus group and you’re just like, wow, that really helps me do this in the case or this really.
So do you have an example that maybe we could walk through?
Lucas Faust: Well, we have an example. I have a client who sustained a traumatic brain injury and he and his wife, they didn’t just, you know, whoops, have a baby. They [00:30:00] actually went ahead and did in vitro fertilization after the brain injury to get her pregnant.
So she’d get pregnant. And so they went through this whole gamut of I mean, IVF and all this other stuff, which If your family’s been through it, my family’s been through, it’s tough, it’s challenging by itself. After that, we were concerned that folks would hold it against him. And my gut was, they’re going to hold it against this client of mine for he and his wife going out and having IVF.
Well, that was part of a focus group that we ran that part of one of four focus groups we ran that day, but just the facts alone to a person again, they surprised us to a person. They were like, no, that’s great. That is part of being a human being. He should not lose that aspect. And then he may have challenges, but this will probably help him.
It’ll probably be good for him, which blew me away. I thought they would say, how stupid are they? How reckless are they? I mean, he’s not going to be able to take care of them. [00:31:00] It was the opposite. They absolutely should be able to have a child and they’re not going to hold it against them. So that actually made me relax about that development.
I never said a cross word about that to my client. You have to know your lane sometimes. I mean, really on that deal, Hey, that’s a life decision that they had to make. And they took it. Congratulations. They have a baby now. And we, one of the things that happens when you have fewer clients, you get a closer relationship with them.
I mean, we Heather babysits the baby. Now you get a lot tighter with people and that’s been a positive thing for us, but that didn’t save us. That definitely eased my mind. As far as a specific question is concerned.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. What I also love about when you kind of go in with the like, ah, you know, I think this is not going to turn out well.
And then it does the opposite. What I also love is like, they’re giving you all the language and the ways to talk about it later on down the road when it’s like, cause you know, an adjuster is going to be like, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We’re going to throw that all over the place. And you’re like, well, just parent [00:32:00] back what those focus groupers are saying, because, Hey, they say it best.
You’re just repeating it.
Lucas Faust: Absolutely. And my best, I mean, As lawyers, we speak our own language. It’s really important that you ground yourself in what regular people, how they communicate.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. And I just had that yesterday where we ran one and it wasn’t like total shocking, but it was just the way they talked about it was like, Oh, this is how we talk about it because it was just kind of like, how do we say this?
It’s very difficult, touchy topic. They nailed it. And it was just like, okay. So sometimes that’s why I would say like with focus groups, I’m like, Listen and go back and read through. I mean, I love getting the transcripts because then you can really say like, how did they really talk about that? I know they were on my side, but how did they describe it?
It was just like, aha, here’s the words they use. Here are the phrases that were so helpful.
Lucas Faust: And I really encourage people to, we use Rev. com.
Elizabeth Larrick: Me
Lucas Faust: too. Buck a minute [00:33:00] and you can do an hour long. I mean, can you imagine, I can’t imagine transcribing that for any amount of money, let alone 60 for a full hour of transcript time.
And you can do your focus group for 60 bucks an hour. It’s hugely helpful. There’s a process when I do the focus group, then I’ll read the transcript and then I’ll watch the focus group. Eventually, I kind of pounded into my head what is important for these people, for your audience. And if I skipped any of those steps, I’m doing myself a disservice.
If I’ve already invested the time to do the focus group, just go ahead and read the transcript. Watch it again after you’ve done it. And don’t just think you have to figure it out the first time because they’re almost always, almost every single time I will get stuff either reading the transcript. We’re watching the group every time.
So it’s a three part process for sure. And being disciplined, I don’t feel like watching that, but just go ahead and do it. That’s worth doing.
Elizabeth Larrick: I appreciate you saying that because every time we’ll do it and then you’re there and you get that first impression. And then when I go back underneath, I’m like, [00:34:00] wow, I totally missed that person said that like, wow, or you can’t gather it all in.
And then it’s going to marinate. And you’re gonna be like, oh yeah. So I love that you said that. So many times people. We’ll do it and the thing we did it, we did it. And I’m like, well, but you could squeeze that orange so much more. And then that value level goes up a couple more notches for you. So it’s not just one and done.
You can get more info. And I got to cheat when I watch focus groups again, I’ll speed it up one and a half times or slow it down, but it’s just getting that back in there and then sometimes you don’t have to ever do it again. You’ve got that memo or just the high points.
Lucas Faust: One of the things when you’ve done a lot of focus groups, a lot of them, I’m reading an interesting book by a fellow by the name of Trevor Moad.
He’s developed a thinking, he calls it neutral thinking, not positive thinking, not negative thinking, but neutral thinking. You take in the information and you don’t let it rock you. It’s like, okay, that’s fine. What I do find from, there’s almost this, the problem when you’re so wedded to your [00:35:00] case, you will just look at it and you so badly, cause you’ve worked your tail off on everything, want it to go the right way.
And then. The problem with getting negative from what the feedback you’re getting is you’re not listening to everything. Because it is so tough on you. The closer you can get to being neutral and just sit there, take it in, you’re less likely to skew your focus groups. Number one, that’s very interesting.
That’s got to be, that’s your mantra. That’s very interesting. So it’s okay that an adult film star lost money and you think she should recoup it. That’s very interesting. The best advice I can give is don’t be wedded to your preconceived notions. If you said the better, more, you can set those aside and do, that’s very interesting.
It just takes a lot of being proven wrong. And if you’ve been married, you have a spouse, maybe tells you how wrong you are. Sometimes you kind of learn over a while that that’s very interesting. You’ll learn that it’s okay to be wrong because you’re just going to be. And that’s the fun part. That’s where the fun stuff is.
Um, sooner you [00:36:00] prove, figure stuff out that maybe you’re wrong earlier on in your case. You can recover from it. The longer you wait, the less chance there is to recover, but you got to do the process first, or you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s the biggest
Elizabeth Larrick: takeaway. I think that’s the hardest part when people want to come to me and they want to do their own focus group, which I of course encourage, but I also say like, are you too close because you got to go in there and you got to get everybody and you just say, okay, gotcha.
but sometimes you don’t w person because you want t get the
Lucas Faust: people that call some focus group clips fo you’re like if you don’t don’t need to manufacture already in pocket, then t because they’ll always se they naturally flow and i does surprise you, it wil you. It’ll surprise the o probably to understand this.
The people on the [00:37:00] other side of the case, they have an interest, but they’re not stupid. They’ve thought their way. And maybe the only way to kind of sort out where folks really will think is this process. And if defense counsel is convinced it’s the other way, well, maybe just take a step back and ask some regular folks.
And if they’re right, they’re right. If they’re wrong, then they’re wrong. And then you feel confident then it’s that level of confidence you get after you run four or five focus groups and they’re consistent, sometimes they fall out, you’ll run number three and it’d be like, wow, that was weird. What happened there?
You run a back again, it’s back on track. Or there’s almost always a, when there’s a wrinkle, you kind of know what to do, but you have to do multiple to get there. So if you make it efficient, get in, get out, you can do three or four at a time. It doesn’t cost. As much money as you might think.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. And that’s, I was going to say, I think one of the things that I would repeat about what you’ve said and what I’ve said in past ones, which is you can do some of these things in 20, 30 minutes, which means if you’re running three hours or even two hours [00:38:00] virtually, because again, Like Lucas, you’ve said it’s way more convenient.
It’s also going to be much more inexpensive than having to host people in person. You can do so many cases. And then that just cuts that glass and that pie up to get more cases done. So I don’t think either one of us are advocating, okay, you need to spend three hours on the same case, just to learn the narrative, you know,
Lucas Faust: cut it up and then compare the previous focus groups with one another.
Cause you’ll eventually find a, a, a. There was that case in Seattle you work with Mr. Keenan on, you broke down, as I recall, you broke down the type of demographic that you wanted to see, and if that took, and not see, and not see. You did not want to see the bookworm. You wanted to see the active outdoors person.
I mean, so you found the demographic that fit and it repeated itself, but you only get there by running multiple focus groups.
Elizabeth Larrick: Oh my gosh. That
Lucas Faust: happens.
Elizabeth Larrick: They had 13. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was, it was a lot, but
Lucas Faust: it probably took at least 10 to get it right and figure it out. Oh my gosh. There you go.
Elizabeth Larrick: When I think the [00:39:00] other thing too, which we face here in Texas, and I know lots of the people listening and you probably the same thing where it’s just like cases take so much longer.
So, it’s not like we’re running 10 focus groups in a year because we know. It may take some time. And what I find is if I’ve set something down for a while, for whatever reason, and I go and pick it back up, like sometimes just running a focus groups just gets me back in there. Cause I get back in there. I, you get back in it, you get excited about it again.
So those were in that particular file. I’m in that head case gone on for several years. Those were not done. Boom, boom, boom, boom, 13. They were along the way and just keeping it going with the new information or retesting that opening again. And so focus groups. Really? And at some point I do also agree, like some point there’s a cutoff.
We don’t need
Lucas Faust: to return at some point, but as long as you’ve kind of planned out where you’re heading with it, they make sense. So I mean, you go from your narrative all the way [00:40:00] down to your adversarial at the tail end of this. And your adversarial focus group, if you’ve gotten to a point where your adversarial focus group is ready to go and you’re winning your adversarial focus groups, you can go into trial, feel pretty doggone competent.
That’s going to show in your presentation. And it’s going to, it’s almost like a self fulfilling prophecy. You feel a lot better about it. And everybody knows you feel more, you’re more confident, understand your weak points too, but no, this is the, the focus group process has dramatically changed my practice.
It’s something we’ve done for about seven years now. And I really appreciate having Heather run these because it, again, it takes a team to get one of these things up and going, and I think the biggest thing is, is you get so wedded to your case. That’s just the toughest thing. You want it to turn out so badly that.
You’ll put blinders on.
Elizabeth Larrick: That’s totally natural. It’s like you’ve got three kids and someone’s your favorite. Well, yeah. Someone is your favorite.
Lucas Faust: There’s always, that’s just the way it is.
Elizabeth Larrick: Natural phenomenon. Yes, exactly. So Lucas, thank you so much for taking some time to [00:41:00] share your knowledge and information, the wealth of it about focus groups with our audience.
Lucas Faust: Absolutely. And Elizabeth, I just, I’ll put this plug in as well. I’ve worked with Elizabeth getting clients ready for testimony, and I can say, without hesitation. That is something that you must do as well. It is something I do in every substantial case and every substantial claim. And we take the time to do that if for no other reason, because I’m too close to it as well.
That’s another important thing to consider.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Lucas. And just for everybody else listening, we will have all of his information in the show notes. If you have a question and I look forward to having Heather on our podcast too, to talk about seventh amendment productions.
I love it.
Lucas Faust: All right. Thank you so much.
Elizabeth Larrick: All right. Thank you so much. And again, thank you for everybody for listening. If you could leave a review or rating on your favorite podcast platform, and also with the new OS opening a new update, if you could do the plus follow sign for me on your Apple [00:42:00] device, that would be really helpful.
And until next time, thank you.