Tips for Building Your Team for Jury Selection
When you’re going to get ready for trial, and you’re building your team to help you pick a jury, you don’t actually need a lot of people. Perhaps one to three people would suffice. Building a small group will help things become more structured for you. That being said, you’ve got to pick people that match up with your ideology on picking a jury altogether. Then let them in on what would help you best as a lawyer.
In this episode, I’m sharing my recent experience of helping a fellow lawyer pick a jury. They wanted my perspective as a female trial lawyer so I decided to show up. There were a couple of things that happened on the fly that I’m going to share here, which are things you may want to consider as you’re building your own team for jury selection.
In this episode, you will hear:
- A strategy that worked well
- Different ways of taking notes
- Things to consider when you’re building a team
- The benefits of taking notes and having notetakers
- Why you want to only build a small group
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If you have questions or a particularly challenging client preparation, email Elizabeth directly for assistance: elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com.
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Episode Transcript:
Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. It’s Elizabeth, your host, and I’m so glad you’re tuning into trial lawyer prep, a podcast dedicated to you trial lawyers getting ready.
It’s just me solo today. We’ve had lots of wonderful guests, but I wanted to jump on solo and talk about a recent [00:01:00] experience that I had helping a fellow lawyer pick a jury. A couple things happened. I thought, you know, this might be a worthy topic. A couple of things that happened on the fly, I was asked by a friend of mine to come help pick a jury and it’s going to be in what we have in Texas, a county court.
So we don’t have 12 jurors there. We just have six. So the panel itself is a little bit smaller. And so I was asked, Hey, can you please come? I’d like to have your perspective also as a female trial lawyer, your perspective in that sense. So I said, of course, here I come. So load up, and we had gotten some of the jury information before, all that kind of stuff.
So I show up, and there’s several folks. We had about six to eight people who showed up. Imagine a courtroom, which is a lovely courtroom. We have a new courthouse here in Austin, so always gotta mention that. And again, it’s a smaller panel. So I think we had a total of maybe 36 people panel. So 36 people panel.
We [00:02:00] have all the lawyers who are assisting her in the jury box. And there’s again, there’s eight of us and then there’s plaintiff’s lawyer, defense lawyer and clients. And that’s really it. It was a lot of people. And I would say in my vote, too many people for a couple of reasons. One is. That’s a lot of people who have a lot of opinions who might all not line up with what you need as the actual lawyer picking the jury.
So maybe just too many people to listen to. Also like I said, it might be just too many different ideas. Like people have different ideas about, Hey, this is what I’ve been taught and Oh, here’s what I’ve been taught. So again, lots of different ideas about how to do your job. And there’s just not a lot of time.
The judge should give us about 15, 20 minutes to kind of get together. And also what I found was a little bit maybe discombobulating is we’re there to help her pick a jury, but we don’t really know the order for questions. We didn’t even really know what [00:03:00] questions she was going to ask. Now I kind of knew because I’ve worked with this person before, so I knew the flow of where she was going.
But ultimately I just. Um, on the fly, just like the potential jurors hearing things for the first time in my gut, I’m thinking, Oh, well, is that a cause or is that a strike? Did she get it all the way or did she not? What are we listening for? I knew very little about the case as well. So when we get back, again, we’re just trying to toss all this stuff around.
I took notes a certain way. Other people took notes a different way. It is helpful to have extra people again to hear the things you didn’t hear. And we’ll talk about how many people I think is probably most helpful. But also something else that really stuck out that, I know was a strategy that worked and let me tell you why.
So the defense lawyer got up and said, geez. It’s a lot of lawyers to pay, just let alone me over here. Now, we already knew this guy, this defense lawyer scheme, we knew that [00:04:00] that was going to happen, or I knew to an extent it would, even if she just had one person helping her. But he kind of the way that he said it, it kind of worked.
And a juror actually stood up, potential juror stood up and said, I feel bad for you. Like, that’s a whole lot of people to pay and gosh, that was kind of like, wait, what? Whoa, hold on here. And I can’t. The judge had said, even the plaintiff’s lawyer had said, these are people from the plaintiff’s bar who are here to listen and to learn.
Of course, that went right out the window, but it just kind of like, oh man, he actually struck a chord. And if there’s one person who’s saying that, there’s going to be several people thinking the exact same thing. And people didn’t raise their hand, but it was not a very talking panel. So. Long story short, it was kind of a little bit of a discombobulation for her hearing all that and then us knowing that we’ve got to pick some people.
What I would suggest and I think that ultimately the panel that came that shook out that she got There were a [00:05:00] lot of things that just were really out of control out of her control out of our control And there were definitely good things that helped her get her some people struck For cause from the jury panel because we were there helping but what struck me was I’m sitting there next to another lawyer And he said well, I’m really curious.
Like how do you take notes? And do you have a system? And I said, I don’t really have a super clear system. I try to make it really simple and it really is simple. It’s a frowny face. If people are making a frowny face, like literally frowny face. I don’t really want to complicate it. I’ve seen people who have lots of different colors, like some big giant notepads.
That’s cool. What I found super helpful, and when I’ve worked with this lawyer before, what she found super helpful was getting down the words that people are using and saying that can get them struck for cause. That’s negative, right? There’s positive things too. Again, there’s my smiley face. But I don’t really have a [00:06:00] super complicated method for writing or taking notes.
What it really made me think about was what would really help people and what I think would have helped. And again, my suggestion is going to be when you do think about going to trial and you’re building your team. Thinking about how many people you would like to get on a perspective point of view for helping you.
But also having somebody in your corner that knows the flow of what you’re asking. And knows that, hey, this question right here, that’s to try to find those rats. And this question over here is really to find information. Who are some people that we want? Who are people who told really positive stories?
And If you know the flow, you obviously can keep the space on your page or your notepad ready for that. Because what I have found is judges want to hear, well, what did they say? You’re [00:07:00] up there doing your deal. You’re just trying to get people to open up. You’re doing the deal. You don’t necessarily remember, oh, that person said exactly this.
And you really don’t want to take notes. So that’s what your helpers are there for, is to take those notes with those things. Well, this is what they said, judge. Oh yeah, that’s right, they did say that. And generally it jogs their memory. Although, most judges will take notes as well, but my suggestion is you’ve got to find somebody who knows the flow of your questions.
Knows that you’re looking on this question to find people to write down those exact words now I understand we’re not perfect transcriptionists. So most the time it’s just oh, no that person said ABC Just a couple of words or these people raise their hands a lot of times what happened was she’d say, okay Now this question if you’ll just raise your hand for me And we’d take down people’s numbers and that was helpful to kind of group people together, but there were so many of us, right?
There’s eight people all helping. And that was the next thing that I had was [00:08:00] you really kind of want to build a pretty small group, right? You want to one, let your group in. If you’ve got one to two people, that may be enough. These are people that one, you trust, you want their perspective. They kind of have the same ideology on building The jury that you want.
So you want to make sure they kind of line up with all those things and you’re teaching them enough to know like, Hey, here’s where I’m going. Hey, this is the thing that helps me the most. And that’s just going to be a communication thing. But once you have a little bit of smaller group, you guys have a little bit of flow.
Meaning you know where the questions are going and what the purposes are so you can write down what’s needed. And then when you get back there to have that discussion about who do you want and who do you don’t want and what they say, it’s much more structured. Some of the best ways that I’ve seen it done when you have 15 to 20 minutes, sometimes you have less, is basically you run through your list of people who are like, here’s the strikes, here’s this, here’s what these people said.
Here’s my worry, [00:09:00] here’s the worry person I have, and the next person goes, and the next person goes, and then having done that because you’ve got a small group of people, you’ve really got a good amount of knowledge to help pick the people that you want and you don’t want. Because again, if you’re up there doing it, you have a hard time saying, Seeing everything else.
You have a hard time retaining everything. And that’s why you’ve got one to two people to help. Take those notes, record those things, find that body language, the frowning, the squirming. And again I know that 100 percent body language is not going to give us any help. It’s hard to predict what people are doing or not doing but sometimes people are pretty clear in jury selection like they don’t want to be there and They say things and then they match it with their body language.
Let me give you examples. So there was a juror who pretty much every question that she was trying to find the people who would not be fair to either But either party and this guy every time hands shot up every single time. I mean, he just, for sure, won it [00:10:00] off this jury. And then the body language matched right up with that.
And other people have body language that you can’t really tell. You’re not really sure they’re frowning. But we’re not really sure what that means. It’s mostly when people are pairing it together. For example, the guy who wanted to stand up to speak to say, I do have sympathy and I think that there’s too many lawyers over there.
All those lawyers getting paid. That seems like a waste. No, that’s a, that body standing up to tell me that. So again, some of these things are little notes, but. It’s easier to have somebody else taking those little notes for you while you are being present with the jury, asking questions, nodding along and giving your attention.
That’s really where you want to be when you are asking questions of the jury for jury selection. All right, so let me do a quick recap. When you’re going to get ready for trial and you’re building your team to help you pick a jury, you don’t need a lot of people, right? We need to have one, two people.
[00:11:00] Whatever those two people are, maybe three people, and let them in a little bit on the flow of where you’re going. Let them also in on what helps you best, meaning some people have really bad memories, so you writing down those specific words to help them go back and talk to the judge, that’s what they want.
Other people have great memories. But because they have a great memory, they may not be able to see everything else in the courtroom. And so they really want you to be eyes and ears around them while they remember those things. And that may also just come down to, hey, what’s your feel? When you heard that, what was your feel?
Mine was good. Was yours bad? Right? So sometimes we just go, hey, you may have felt that way. Here’s what I took that as. But you want to pick somebody again that kind of matches up with your ideology on picking a jury all together. So you want to pick a small team. But pick a team that lines up with your, your fault, your style.
And then also you want to let them in on kind of the flow so they know about [00:12:00] where you’re going and then what helps you best as a lawyer and as somebody who’s gonna maybe get up and argue those strikes or ask the judge for something specific. I hope that was helpful. I don’t have any real advice on note taking.
I think it really comes down to the person. If you like having a giant notepad and Like taking things down, having out like that’s great. That may work for you visually. I have a pretty good working memory. So for me, having just those little symbols sometimes helps enough. And then sometimes having just those key words that people say is enough for me.
Then again, I think also sometimes it comes down to, well, how much time do you have for jury selection? Some people end up getting days. Now, you’re really going to want some copious note takers. Some people get 30 minutes, right? And that’s. It’s very short amount of time. Do you really need eight people to help you?
Probably not. You’re probably good with just one person. So that also something to keep in mind, how much time you have. I hope [00:13:00] that this was helpful. I hope you think about a few of these things when you’re game planning, getting ready for jury selection to build a good system around you and with your peers to help you pick a jury.
All right. Until next time. Thank you.