Setting up Your In-House Focus Group System
Have you ever wondered how to set up a focus group system that not only saves you money but also provides invaluable feedback for your courtroom success? In this episode, I share my insights and experiences on creating your very own focus group that will help you improve your skills and case strategies. I cover the non-economic damages model, the confusion around it, and how it could create gaps in your case. Plus, I discuss how to eliminate a defense argument and even add facts to your case from the focus group feedback.
We dive deeper into strategies for ensuring reliable feedback from your focus groups, such as preventing repeats, providing clear instructions, and utilizing the right tools for communication, payment, hosting meetings, and advertising. By treating participants with respect and making it easy for them to participate, you can guarantee they’re engaged and providing honest feedback. Listen as I discuss how these strategies can help you get the practice and feedback needed for courtroom success.
Lastly, I touch on streamlining focus group logistics by suggesting the use of tools like PayPal, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Dropbox. To help you get started, I’m offering a free download of my questionnaire. So hit play and join me in this episode to learn how to optimize your focus group system and ultimately improve your abilities in the courtroom. Don’t forget to leave a review and follow the podcast to help others find it!
In this episode, you will hear:
- Learning from focus groups
- The value of having a Gmail account
- Setting up and managing focus groups
- Ways to improve communication and directions
- How to select from a diverse focus group participants
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Supporting Resources:
Please follow this link to download the Virtual Focus Group Checklist: https://fantastic-designer-3528.ck.page/635800b2c4
Episode Credits:
If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.
Episode Transcript:
Elizabeth Larrick: Hello and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Elizabeth Larrick and I’m your host for Trial Lawyer Prep, a podcast dedicated to folks getting ready for trial and preparing cases the better way.
I’m Last episode you met Rhonda, my focus group recruiter, and we talked pretty extensively [00:01:00] about the system that we use to recruit. And I wanted just to hit a pause and take this episode to dive just a little bit deeper into setting up your own focus group system. Because I know that there is still a lot of hesitation out there to running your own focus group.
And I think it’s something that we can totally do and totally handle. And one of the things I’ve heard over the weekend, ran focus group here in Austin with some great lawyers going to trial and I heard through the grapevine about another focus group that costs a set of lawyers 88, 000. Now that’s a lot of cheese.
So that’s why I want to take time and walk through this with you and setting up your own focus group system. Um, because It is so vital. It’s essential. It literally is not a step that you should [00:02:00] skip because we need the feedback and we need the practice. That’s all there is to it is these focus groups are an amazing place to get that feedback to get that practice where you wouldn’t get it somewhere otherwise.
And again, I’m going to go ahead and say again, focus groups, okay, because we’re not talking about. mock trials. We’re talking about doing things and efficient, getting things done in an hour, getting it done in two hours, maybe even getting it done in three hours, depending on what needs to get done, but making it really efficient for you so the cost is efficient as well.
So talking to my trial lawyers here, Which found the podcast. So you know that this is for you and wanting to give basically what I have learned in my eight years with the focus group system that I have set up for me. And remember when I started doing this, I was basically a sole lawyer and I didn’t even have any staff when I first started out [00:03:00] doing focus groups by myself.
So this is a system that has been evolved, but it still evolves, but basically it’s set, it’s easy, we follow it every time. I’ve had many, multiple people, multiple staff follow the system without a problem. And then of course Rhonda has picked up that system and we’ve carried it forward. So focus groups.
Just to touch on that, why would we do focus groups? And let me tell you, every focus group, no matter what, the number one thing I hear from lawyers after we finish a focus group is, I learned something new. And that’s what we need, is that outside perspective and the testing. And these are lawyers who, with years of experience, 30 plus trials, right, they’re telling me, hey, wow, I wasn’t expecting that reaction.
Or, I’m glad I learned to see how people see that fact, because I thought it was different. Or, wow, we’ve got a hole in the case right there that we need to fill up with some facts and information. Let me give [00:04:00] you a concrete example. Doing a testing in a focus group of a damages model. Right, so what the lawyer believes will be a way to calculate the damages in the case.
Generally, when we talk about a damages model, we are talking about that. non economic part of things, right? Economics are easy. We can add up numbers. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the non economic stuff, right? So in some places, it’s mental anguish. In some places, it’s pain and suffering.
Okay. So that’s really kind of what we’re talking about. We want to test it out. Okay. Which is, I think, a great way. We, sometimes we come in with what we want to test it for, what the number is, but really it was the model, how we’re calculating came in with us. Seems super clear, but in the feedback from the focus group, Was just confusion and the way that had been calculated people thought that he was referring to lost wages And so people got on tangents about [00:05:00] lost wages and some people just Because of the level of kind of confusion just turned him off altogether now That’s a pretty valuable piece of feedback.
Now, how long did it take to do that? 30 minutes We’re talking very efficient use of time, and then again, turning and getting that feedback back from focus groups. Another example that I had where we were doing a focus group and testing both sides of a case and the lawyer learned that that one defense argument made a lot of ground with these people.
And that was one thing we kept hearing over and over again in discussion. It was like, okay, we need to eliminate. that argument and give these facts. We have these facts in the case. Always going to learn something new, and again, sometimes it feels really subtle, what you’re learning, but it has a giant impact on the case overall.
And we talked a little bit about this at the beginning of this episode, that [00:06:00] what’s the holdout? What are the problem areas for us? Generally, I hear, well, it’s too expensive. Or it’s too time consuming, or I’ve never done it before. I’ve never even done a focus group at all. So I wouldn’t even know where to start.
So let’s tackle our first top two things, which is it’s expensive and it’s time consuming. This is what this podcast is about. And that’s what a lot of the feedback is on in the blogs and on my website. And even in the handout that I had today is, you set up your own system so that you can control that cost.
And you set up that system to eliminate the time consuming part of things so somebody else can do this for you. Now, of course, you can offload all of these things, but that can increase the cost. And that’s what we’re trying to be really cost conscious for trial lawyers who are out there who are solos.
Maybe you’ve got a mid sized firm. And time consuming because maybe you’ve got a lot of cases on your plate. And being efficient with your time is really something that you need to do. And, of course I’ve never done it [00:07:00] before. Well, that’s, we’re here to talk about, there’s lots of, again, episodes that I’ve done and even blog posts about never done it.
Try this first. And maybe that will be another one that we refresh and bring back to never done before. Let’s talk about it. And I do know that in the month of June, this month, I’m going to have conversation with a lawyer who had never done focus groups before and picked it up and has run with it. And so we’re going to talk about, Hey, feedback on that part of things.
But let’s talk a little bit about a solution which would be never done before. How can we set up the system to make it efficient time wise and expense wise? When I started out in 2015, I had a rough idea how to set up a focus group. I’d had some prior experience with my prior job where we’d run a few focus groups, but we had some staff that was helping us.
So, when I went out on my own, without any staff, I kind of had a few holds to figure out. And, the two main things that I did right from the start, one of them was, um, uh, I[00:08:00]
And that would be collecting, recording, and storing all the past participants and having it in a program. I use Excel, nothing super fancy, to be able to collect data points like emails and no shows along with the date they attended, the time they were Of course, once we turn virtual, then we add that virtual column in there, virtual person, but collecting all that data from the start is fantastic because that then allows me to search to see who has ever attended before to prevent repeat attendance.
Now, I know that repeats can be used. I do, but what I want to see is I want to see time pass before these folks come back. Six, eight months, sometimes two years. And of course, some people are not ever invited back, but what’s really important is we don’t want focus [00:09:00] group people who do this for a living to join into our focus group because most of the time they’re just parrots.
They just mimic, right? They don’t actually tell us real feedback. They get either really upset or they try to take the opposite view, be a contrarian inside the focus group. You never really can nail down what the actual feedback is or the truth is from the feedback. So that’s why I always try to prevent repeats, especially back to back repeats.
So I track that as well. And then again, of course, I don’t invite people back who don’t show up. Now, there are people who reschedule, or there are people who need to cancel. That’s different than just a complete no show, so we always track that as well. And that just, again, prevents a lot of frustration on recruiting and getting people in there.
And I really harp away about this prevent repeats because of course it’s super easy to invite the same people back, even though it’s a different case, Elizabeth, it’s no, they’ve seen you before, they know what the song and dance [00:10:00] is. You’re not going to get solid feedback, that’s reliable, right? We want to make sure we can rely on what we’re getting, otherwise focus groups are a wash.
It’s garbage in, garbage out, right? So if you put whoever signs up first out the gate, not vetting at all, and then you have focus groups. And you think, wow, that went really well. Who’d you have sitting in the seat? How do we test our reliability? Who was sitting in the seats and then what’d you present?
Because a lot of times we can do a really great job of putting a great set of people in there. And then we get a presentation that argues with people. That’s extremely biased. And we tried to set up things to make sure that we’re being neutral and people, the cover’s blown sometimes people say to me, and it’s just, okay, so can we really rely on it?
But anyhow, the second thing that I did from the start and I took time was that I always wanted to treat all our participants with respect. I wanted to make sure they knew where to go, when to be there, when they would get [00:11:00] paid. I want to make sure that when we were in person we had as many creature comforts as possible.
Sometimes it’s not totally possible to do that when you’re in a limited space or got limited funds. But here’s the thing, I knew from the very jump, running focus groups, I wasn’t going to pay top dollar. Okay, I get a lot of complaints still to this day. I went to this other focus group, they paid me 150.
I went to this other one and I’m like, okay, I hear you, but here’s the thing. The questions that we have to ask you are not personal. We’re not coming in to make people give us. A lot of personal private information. What we’re here to do is get your Feedback on the presentation. And also I know that there’s a budget that we have to accommodate.
Now again, that doesn’t mean I still pay the same amount of money that I did eight years ago. We’ve had to go up, we’ve had to pay more. But again, I still get complaints for that. But also I want to treat people with respect because I run a referral program. Which is basically asking people who’ve attended, had a good time, or a good experience to refer [00:12:00] somebody else.
And in that referral program, I have been able to gain people who are engaged, who show up, and make great participants. So I want to make sure we do that. Also, I’ve noticed, again, when people can’t find the place, or they get the time wrong, and they get super flustered, it’s really hard to get them to calm back down.
To then be able to focus on what you’re saying and get feedback. So I want to make sure to eliminate all those things so we can go over the top when it comes to giving instructions, to giving reminders. If we have a location, we give them, we link it with a Google app, right? Just to make sure we’re going the extra mile so that they know exactly where they’re going to go.
The two things we did right from the start, but I did right from the start to make sure. So let’s jump into really quickly. The focus group system and right up the gate, when you’re setting up your system, the first thing you need to sit down is you need to pick your tools. Some people [00:13:00] fancily call this your tech stack, but I’m just gonna call it your tools.
Cause I’m not a toll tech person. And I’m definitely not with all the up and all how much to talk about things. So it’s your tools. Okay. So for me, it’s Gmail, it’s PayPal, it’s zoom, it’s Adobe, it’s Craigslist. So what did I just list? How do I communicate with people? I use Gmail. How do I pay people? PayPal.
With virtual, what platform am I going to use to host the meeting? Zoom. For my confidentiality, I’m going to use Adobe. And for advertising, I’m going to use Craigslist. And I also use Facebook. So, in all of these things, always be thinking about what is the easiest for participants. You want it to be easy on you as well, because you’re learning this.
But most of these tools We’ve already been using as trial lawyers. I use Adobe for eSignature because it’s a program I already pay for. I use Zoom. It’s a program I already pay for. I also, when I started out, that seemed to be [00:14:00] the easiest platform. And so, I’ve taken it and used it over the years. They definitely improved it by and far.
There are new things you can do and fancy things you can do. PayPal, I chose that one. Just kind of, that’s what I chose. And, um, I see, here’s a couple pitfalls that I see with some of the technology people pick. One is you pick a lot of stuff. Meaning, I know some lawyers who they’ll use whatever payment platform people want.
Some people want Cash Appet, some people want Venmo, some people want PayPal, some people want Zelle. Like, that now becomes a logistical nightmare for your staff who’s going to be paying. So we, from the very start, PayPal, that’s it. If you don’t have it, sorry, you can’t be a part of it. And that makes it really easy when you’re going to go make payment to people that you have one program they log into and make the payment and it’s done.
Is it the best payment platform out there? I don’t know. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. PayPal and Venmo are the same people. But I [00:15:00] still get arguments both ways or either way from people who want to join but don’t have PayPal. I just say, sorry, that’s just the way we use it. I also see as far as picking your tools, I love Gmail because there are So many things inside that 6 account.
Always do the paid account. Please do not skip on this because you do not want any of that information. You don’t, it’s, again, you don’t have any privacy. Let’s just put it that way. You have zero privacy if you don’t pay for it. So pay the 6. It’s totally worth it because you want to make sure that none of this, all this stuff doesn’t get leaked, especially if you are using Gmail as a way to transfer videos.
Okay. To people, to co counsel, or you’re putting materials up in the Gmail for document storage. So pay the 6. It’s totally worth it to have that paid account. Now Gmail of course gives you document storage, like I talked about, or just general online store storage, but it gives you access to questionnaires that you can make.[00:16:00]
And of course the Google calendar. And we use those for every single focus group and it makes it super easy. It’s all in one place instead of having it in different places. Now again, this is the tool that we use to communicate with people, so we’re using that email and we’re using that Google Calendar to communicate with our folks.
And we are doing a questionnaire form, we call it a questionnaire, to get people to respond to our advertising. Some folks ask people in the Craigslist ad, hey, email me a response to these 30 questions. What are the chances you’re going to get somebody to answer all 30 questions? It’s possible. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but I am saying you may not get very many choices, right?
Because people want it easy. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to apply. And you also want to make sure they’re paying attention, right? So we use our questionnaire form to gather [00:17:00] information about people, but also to kind of run a little bit of a test to make sure are actually reading the ad.
The questionnaire or the makes it super easy for us to manage and seal information in one place, but also learning from Zoe chance and her book influences your superpower, which we did a review with Jason here recently. What’s the easiest, how do you make it easy and having a quick, easy questionnaire, we used to have a ton of questions on there.
I’ve narrowed that down again, out of ice for Rhonda, who talked about that, where people seem to have a hundred questions. questionnaire they have to fill out and then they’re mad when they don’t get picked or they just give up on it. So we want to make it an easy tool to use. Those questionnaires are super easy.
Of course, then it turns into a sheet so you can see everything everywhere. And also, again, it creates a little bit of a. tool to help people. If somebody fills out the form, okay, they’re eligible. If they send an email in response to Craigslist, they’re [00:18:00] automatically not considered because they’re not following directions.
And you got to have people follow directions, even if they’re doing in person, they got to follow directions to get there. Or if it’s Zoom, you got to follow the directions to get into the Zoom meeting. So you definitely want the people who get at least at a bare minimum do that because you want people who are going to actually show up at jury selection.
So part of the system, pick your tools. If you need to vet some tools, that’s good. But basically, like we talked about, you need to have a way to communicate with them. And I will say, having a separate Gmail account is key, right? Because if you’re emailing them from your lawyer account, they’re automatically going to be conjuring up things in their mind about lawyers and what the folks group’s about.
So having that separate Gmail to communicate and have all the other tools with it, calendar, all that good stuff. Pick a way to pay people. That’s helpful. Even today, when we’re doing in person, I still use that PayPal to pay people. I think it’s super easy, creates a receipt for every [00:19:00] person, and I don’t have to fumble with going to get cash.
Pick a platform for doing your virtual, I suggest Zoom. Pick a way to do electronic confidentiality. There’s tons of options out there, Dropbox now offers eSignature, HelloSign, DocuSign, whatever it is. Just Pick one and go for it. And then of course, pick how you’re going to advertise. I use Craigslist and I use Facebook.
To do that, there’s Nextdoor. There’s all kinds of ways you can advertise. Just consider what your budget is. Okay. And. other free ways that you can do that, which would be like one of the ways I use the referral program. All right. So picture tools, and now you need to look at, okay, so what can we automate or even semi automate in my system?
Emails. This is something we’re going to send the same email out for every single FocusScript, we’re just going to change dates, times, maybe the amount of the incentive, right? So emails, that’s great. Gmail will host [00:20:00] templates, right? I know Outlook will do that now too. Easy way to make those templates, get them set up and then just boom, you don’t have to retype those emails.
And again, first email, second email, reminder emails, day of emails, all of that can be put into a template and make it very easy. I will say I’ve tried group emailing and individual emailing. Hands down, do the individual. Because what I have found is people will respond more to the individual one. So I’ll get more people that say, Yep, confirmed.
I will totally be there. Versus if we do a group one. So I know it may save time to do one email with everybody on it. Even blindsees see it. Yeah, okay. Here’s the thing. We use the draft. So we basically draft. All the reminder emails, we draft all our zoom emails so that when it comes time to get it done, it’s just open it, put the email in and go or open it and hit send, you know, it’s [00:21:00] semi automated, right?
So you could use a tool that makes it very automated. That’s going to be more expensive versus having somebody do it semi automated questionnaires. Again, we just copy, create. I used to do a single questionnaire for every single focus group. Of course, that creates a lot of questionnaires. And now we just do one, pretty much one per year.
Or if there are some specific for focus groups, then we’ll create one specific for them. And of course the check in process. You can write that out and have that good to go for in person or in virtual. And it, again, was super easy where you want to check people’s photo IDs. We want to make sure they sign confidentiality and is the technology work, right?
Super simple things here, but again, write it out, have it done. And then you can always have it go back to refer to it. Or if somebody new comes in to step into that role, It can do it very easily. And finally, which would be fine tuning. Part one of your system is pick your tools. Part two is what can be automated or semi [00:22:00] automated, and then go ahead and do that.
So that makes it very easy to reproduce those things every time. And then last one is fine tuning. And that is just. It’s going to happen. There’s going to be something that you forget about that you, Oh, I need to add that. And this happened, of course, constantly. So when we first started doing virtual, we had people show up on cell phone.
That’s not going to work. So we found a way to put that very clearly multiple times. Then when someone showed up on a cell phone, we had a way of saying, Oh, I can’t have a cell phone. We had people who were getting in that didn’t have a PayPal because we weren’t reconfirming the PayPal. And one of the things, too, that we found were just the days that it took us to recruit.
And that used to be a week out. Sometimes we now start at 10 days out. And then just small things that were happening that we were realizing, like, Oh, okay, we need to figure out a way to vet for people who are trying to get in from out of the U. S. It’s not folks that we [00:23:00] want. Most of the time, If you tell people up front what you need, and what is not good, or what you’re not looking for, they generally will not apply.
However, sometimes they do as well. And again, that’s just a matter of, okay, how do we tell people politely, Hey, this is for people who live in the U. S., or this is a study for people who live in California. And then we put that in the questionnaire as well, right? So we want to make sure people Who may breeze past that or read it and breeze past the question.
We have a way to look at that and make sure. And again, that’s all just fine tuning for problems. Another thing that we ran into is, of course, people from outside the U. S. have PayPal outside the U. S., which then has a fee. Who has to pay the fee? We don’t have that in our system. Guess what? Now it’s in our emails.
Just to let people know, if you have, it’s connected to a foreign bank, you’re going to pay the fee, not us. And we haven’t had any complaints for that. Alright, so it’s a lot about the system. [00:24:00] And I know there’s a lot of information, so I wanted to let you know I do have a free download. It’ll be in the show notes, the link to it.
That gives you the questionnaire I used, the tools I used, the confidentiality form that I used. So if you’re curious about that or want to start beyond Scratch, please use that. Get started. And basically what the system puts out for me, it creates a table of folks for me to choose from. In the table, I can quickly eliminate people I don’t want to use, leaving us with people who are eligible.
And I will tell you a big misconception about, oh, okay, I get to this point, I’ll just I’m good to go. There’s still part where you need to pay attention and pick people. And I will say just from having used different staff to do this, one of the biggest things is most people come in and they think, Oh, I’ll just pick the first 10 people and send them an email and we’re done.
Wrong. We don’t want to do that. First of all, you got to vet for repeats, right? You still need to look at the information that’s given [00:25:00] and you got to pick a variety of people. I try to always have a variety of ages, a variety of education, a variety of jobs. Kids know kids, right? And if you pick the first ten people, you might end up having a panel of all single males.
And that might not reflect what the jury poll looks like. So you can’t just automatically pick the first ten, Oh, don’t pick the next ten, right? You’ve got to fine tune at that point and take a little bit of time to stop and look and pick folks. taking that time. Cause you’ve saved so much time on your system and getting people there or getting people to your table, uh, being able to select people is going to help.
So that’s one of the biggest jobs that I do is I go in there to actually select people than put into that email system. And of course, Rhonda helps with that. She vets out people are She’ll say, hey, we’re having a hard time with this person who’s responding or I’ll just say, okay, and we’ve learned I’ve learned if you’re difficult on the [00:26:00] outset, you’re going to be extremely difficult on the inside of the focus group.
So it’s generally a pretty red flag, but get a look and what some of those red flags are when you’re doing it. Okay. I hope that. this podcast episode was helpful. Let’s just stop and recap really quickly. Let’s get you into doing focus groups. Start small. Maybe you do an hour, maybe you do two hours. Set up a system to make it easy on you and your staff to find people to pick.
When you set it up, it’ll be outside your law firm, right? So it won’t be necessarily clued into people that this is a law firm that’s running make it easy on staff. If it’s easy, you’ll do it more. Because once you’re in there and you’re getting that feedback and you’re learning all that good stuff and you’re testing things out, you’re going to see, oh my gosh, this is immensely valuable beyond the expense of 1, 000, 1, 500, or maybe [00:27:00] even 2, 000, right?
Because the value you get out of that is 10x or more because you’re going to learn so many things that you just couldn’t see. We get blinders on, we get into our cases. I really want to stress like getting into this focus group, creating a system for yourself and your staff to start running focus groups.
So I hope that you found this episode helpful and my episode with Rhonda, who is our recruiter to walk through some of those things. If you have questions about focus groups, setting a system, please do not hesitate to call or to email me. And again, we’re going to have that free download of my questionnaire I use.
The tools I use and also confidentiality format free for everybody. It’s going to be in the show notes, but it will take you to another place. Just put your email in and you’ll get an email to you. And again, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review.
That’s a great way for other folks to find me. Also. If you want [00:28:00] to do the plus sign or follow on your favorite podcast platform, that also helps other people be able to find it. And it means a new episode will automatically go into your platform when it is available. All right. And until next time, thank you.