Are You Holding Back Your Case?
Sometimes, we live with our cases for years, before we can find any kind of resolution either through settlement or trial. Now, this creates a tunnel vision where we can put these blinders on. There are blind spots everywhere that we just can’t see. And it gets worse when we block out any other theory or possibility. When we do this, we take on a whole new risk because we are holding the case back.
A focus group is a laboratory. It’s to gather research. Sometimes, you’re going to hear good things, but you’re also digging in to hear the bad things about your case. Focus groups are going to give you fresh eyes in terms of approaching your case and getting you to a whole new emotional movement in your case.
In this episode, I’m going to talk about some reasons lawyers would hold back a case and why you should start considering focus groups to help get you to the next level in solving problems. Ultimately, you have two options here – either stay in the blind spot or be open to learning and eliminate a huge risk of getting a zero on the case.
In this episode, you will hear:
- How people make decisions based on emotions
- What shapes the filter system of jurors
- Finding the problems you can see and you can’t see
- Creating multiple ways to solve the problem
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Episode Transcript:
Elizabeth Larrick: Hello and welcome to a new episode of trial lawyer prep with me, your guide, Elizabeth Larrick.
I am excited to have this podcast and to broadcast tips and tricks for trial lawyers trying to get better to connect with the jury and connect with their [00:01:00] clients. Today’s topic we are going to look at, are you holding your case back in the mindset or in the frame set of I’m going to be talking about the concept of focus groups.
Are you holding things back? And this can happen. I see it happen all the time. It happens with me all the time. Not as much anymore because I’m using some focus groups. But what happens is when I think about this question, I have lots of examples to talk about today. But why would a lawyer hold back a case?
It’s not anything they want to do. I love what we do. We love our clients. We want to help them. We take on a risk by taking on their case and not getting paid till the end. So where could this happen that we end up holding things back? We live with our cases sometimes for years before we can find any kind of resolution either through settlement or through a trial and that creates a tunnel vision where we can put these blinders on and we can’t see [00:02:00] things like blind spots everywhere that we just can’t see because we have tunnel vision.
But what I’ve also seen is it can get even worse than just tunnel vision where we block out. Um, Any other theory, any other possibility. And when we do that, we take on a whole new risk and we, I truly believe are holding the case back. So we have focus groups every week, several a month and different styles.
Sometimes people come in and present themselves. Sometimes I’ll present things. Just a variety of things, and it can be any kind, like either we’re just doing an opening statement, or maybe we’re just having a neutral discussion, kind of with a snapshot of the facts. And at times, the moderator will end up trying to either argue with a participant, or try [00:03:00] to add facts to change their minds, or maybe repeat facts to try and change the participant’s mind.
I’ve also seen where after the focus group, there’s a blaming of the participants, there’s blaming the bad questions, there’s, hey, we should have told them this thing over again and repeated things. And I just kind of scratched my head because a focus group is a laboratory. It’s to gather research. It’s yeah, sometimes you are going to hear good things, but you’re also really digging in to hear the bad things about your case.
And a lot of times what’s happening in these focus groups is this whole other level in your case that you have been either putting those blind spots on or putting the block out, not even seeing it. It’s this whole emotional movement in your case. We go to law school, we’re trained, let’s look at the logic, let’s look at the rational thing.
Okay. That’s what happened. This is this, this A to B, B [00:04:00] to C. Okay. It’s the law, right? Black and white. Take the facts, apply the law, we’re all good to go. If you’ve done any trial training, or trial lawyer training, or any of that good stuff, over and over and over again they talk about, well, people make decisions based on emotion.
Not just in what we do in marketing, making decisions about all kinds of things. Really, we make decisions on the subconscious level. And when we have a case, and we get this tunnel vision, and we really block out what other emotional movements can be going on, we really end up Doing a huge disservice to the case and the client jurors Focus group participants will ignore logic and just use right emotion They’ll use their belief system about the world and it’s just this filter right it.
I’m not creative Someone else has come up with this, right? it’s just this filter that basically all the facts come through in the filters shaped by the experience and Sometimes experience is really broad Right? Think about things that are regularly on [00:05:00] TV or movies or how we get the news. That can be a really broad experience.
Everybody had to go through the pandemic on some level, and that’s a big experience we’ve all had. And then there’s also smaller experiences, right? People who have been in a car wreck or people who have had family members who’ve experienced a medical malpractice, and that all shapes their belief system that basically that filter system.
And then once it comes in, the facts are going to either go support it or not. And so, what happens if we start to ignore that filter system or just decide we don’t even want to know about it? We are really doing a disservice. We’re taking on a whole other risk on the case that we just don’t even know about.
Let’s just talk about this. I’m sure we’ve all heard of an example of you’ve got somebody who went to trial and it’s a run of the red light, crash, and the whole thing’s on tape. The red light’s on tape, the car going through [00:06:00] the red light is on the tape, and they lose. Defense verdict. Zero. Like, how on earth could that happen?
Very logically. Look, we can see there’s a red light. We can see the vehicle running the red light. All the facts are meeting up with the law that says don’t run the red light. But people will make their own decisions. They’ll create those things up if it doesn’t match with what’s in their emotional minds.
So, as I see it, we have two options here. One, we can stay in the blind spot, we can stay in the blocking spot and just say, You know what? I know what I’m doing. I have experience. I know what’s going on here. I got this, right? Just stay where we are. I’m just going to ignore it. I’m going to take the risk that I may get a zero out.
I may take a risk that I’m going to get lower value case. And maybe I understand it, maybe I don’t, but I’m just gonna move on to the next one. Or you could choose the other option, which is [00:07:00] being open to learning, asking other people, trying to find out what is that emotional movement in my case? Is it on my side?
Can I move it to my side? Can I neutralize it? Right? Or at least can I minimize it? But when we find That problem, at least we’re aware and we can know how to fix it. Sometimes it’s not fixed and you do need to settle the case, but that still eliminates a huge risk of getting a zero on the case. So, here’s what I’ve seen in lawyers gaining more information about the problem, right?
The emotional movement in their case, whether it’s for them or against them. Maybe it’s something that they haven’t ever heard about, maybe it’s something they have, but What I always tell people is, even if we’ve heard about it, right? Like, hey, you’ve got a videotape of what happened in this case. It should be slam dunk, no problem.
You, test that out. You [00:08:00] still want to go and look at, what do other folks think about this video? To try and find out, what is the lens that they’re looking at this thing? And what are the snacks? What are some hangups? Once we learn that and can look at all those ways, we can go to work on the problem, trying to create multiple ways to solve the problem.
This kind of emotional hangup that can be there. But once we have more information about where this is coming from, what experiences is having people lean this way, what is, what’s the concern here? And it could be something completely, totally off base. It could be something as simple as having a fact inserted into.
The opening statement got a good group of folks that we do focus groups down in Houston. And they talked about how they had run, it was an explosion case in a home. And one of the most important things they gained from the whole focus group was that [00:09:00] they believed that the plaintiff was smoking, even though there’s no, no evidence anywhere, no medical records, no, nothing, nothing about anywhere was introduced that this guy was smoking, but they created that in their mind.
That he was smoking. He caused the ignition, which then caused the explosion. And they were like, wow, totally worth running the focus group to understand like that whole thing was there. We never would have seen it otherwise. And I totally believe that along with finding the problem and pulling it apart, understanding it as much as you can.
I truly believe that focus groups can go to the next level and help you even solve the problem. But it requires you to understand. to have kind of a level of curiosity that you are able to ask the question in a neutral way. And then you’re able to listen and not argue or talk back. Right. So most of the time, the best kind of questions we can have in [00:10:00] focus groups are open ended questions and then following that up, but tell me more Okay, great.
What did you hear or see that, that brought you to that, right? You just want to understand, hey, where is it coming from? What’s going on? Because that’s where you’re going to learn, okay, well, let’s just think creatively. Let’s just think outside the box. If to move the needle, what else would need to be in this case?
What else would need to be in this fact pattern? What facts or other things? And they’re going to give it to you. Now there are things that they’re going to say that you’re not going to be able to get into evidence. And that’s okay. Think about maybe what they’re saying more, or if you know right then that that’s not admissible evidence, you don’t need to say, well, that’s not admissible evidence.
Tell me something else. They don’t understand the rules of evidence. Most lawyers don’t understand the rules of evidence. So there’s no point in telling focus groups about the rules of evidence. Just say, okay, great. What else? So that what other things? And if somebody says, well, that’s just the absolute one thing and you think, Oh, okay, great.[00:11:00]
Now it’s telling you something about that person, right? We’ve got to have lots of ways and choices to solve problems. Okay. People are one minded, one mind that should tell you something else about, Oh, okay. Well, we need open minded people here to serve on juries, but either way, it’s going to give you information.
So. At the end of the day, we are problem solvers. That’s our whole job. People have a legal problem. Family law, criminal law, personal injury law, workers comp, employment. And we can get stuck in our own mindset, in our own place. And smart lawyers learn constantly. We want to learn more about our cases.
We’re not going to say, Oh, that’s just like the other case I had. You know what, it’s perfectly the same. It’s not. It’s really not. And I guarantee you, jurors and focus groups will tell you, Oh, no, there’s this one little thing right here. But you want to find the problems you can see and the ones that you can’t see.
Because you can [00:12:00] handle all the ones you can see and know about and reduce the risk of those problems. We don’t want to put blinders on, we don’t want to put blockers up, because we want to be able to know the problem in order to reduce the risk of the problem. Otherwise, we already have a lot of risk in a case, but if we put blinders on or we block outside opinions, block outside beliefs about our case, we’re really taking on a whole other level of risk that we don’t really want to do.
So, I challenge you to think about the cases that you have. Is there a case? That maybe you’re standing in the way. Your particular belief, or you think, Hey, this is easy, open and shut. Do you need a fresh set of eyes? Take that case and go ask a non lawyer and don’t ask somebody in your family, right? Ask a complete non lawyer about the facts and just listen and see what they have to say.
And if you’re so inclined, put together your own focus group and put things [00:13:00] together and ask the focus group what they think about stuff. Have somebody else, you’ve got to have somebody else moderate them do that. If you need to read from a list of questions and by golly do that. But the options for finding out more about your cases are really available.
They’re doable and you don’t have to pay somebody if you don’t want to. You can totally do it in house, but at the end of the day, you got to ask yourself, Hey, am I missing something? Is there a risk that I’m just missing altogether? And also, Hey, is there something that I’ve heard that I’m just blocking out of my mind?
So. I hope that this episode was helpful to you. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me. My email is in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening and for being a supporter of the podcast. I would love it if you would rate and review on your favorite podcast platform so that others can find this as well.
Thank you so [00:14:00] much.