Category: Podcast

Even with the mounting pressures of trial preparation, Elizabeth offers three straightforward strategies any lawyer can implement: strategic timelines that tap into natural chronological thinking, active notepad writing to command attention, and the persuasive rule of threes.

Whether you prefer simple sketches or polished presentations, Elizabeth offers guidance on easy techniques that pave the way for a successful trial strategy. 

In this episode, you will hear:

• Strategies for mastering courtroom persuasion for trial lawyers
• Utilizing timelines to organize narratives and simplify complex information
• Techniques for enhancing jury engagement through storytelling
• Practical tips on using giant notepads for courtroom attention and memory retention
• The power of the “rule of threes” in simplifying and organizing presentations

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Supporting Resources:

Learn more about how Elizabeth helps trial lawyer here.

Connect with Elizabeth on LinkedIn.

Join the Trial Lawyer Prep Newsletter to get quick tips and ideas for your case preparation and trial persuasion. Go here to join.

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 (00:02.594)
Hello and welcome back to the podcast. I’m glad that you’re joining me today for this new episode about courtroom persuasion.

And it’s not too late, okay? I’ve got three very simple ideas, you may have already heard them but possibly forgot, that are extremely persuasive to our audiences. Now, this episode piggybacks off of my last episode where we talked about trial strategies and I gave you five questions you could ask to create a strategy for your next trial.

But I wanted to give you three really simple ideas today in this episode so you can add them to any strategy that you may have coming up. And these come from my experience in doing focus groups, of course, in learning through continuing legal education, reading books. And again, these may be things that you have heard, but you may have forgotten because they are so simple.

And why are they persuasive? Well, all three of these ideas work with our brain and short-term memory because when we step into a courtroom, we have a limited time. We always have a time constraint, whether jury selection or opening statement or even with our motions and arguing there will be a limitation. And so we always should be thinking about our audiences and how to work with that short-term memory.

Elizabeth Larrick (02:15.596)
Because there is a limitation and we don’t want to overwhelm it and we want them to remember. So let’s jump right in. Number one simple idea is a timeline. If you’ve worked with me at all, you know how much I love timelines and I always encourage folks, you’ve got a case, let’s put it on a timeline. Because people naturally, we naturally think chronologically. Okay, so beginning, middle, end, right? Think about our stories and

when we put it into a visual and it could be as simple as, know, literally draw a line across the page and have five points that come across chronologically where you can become even more persuasive is where you start your timeline, right? And where you end your timeline. So naturally people may think, okay, let’s take, for example, a car crash. You’re gonna definitely have that point on your timeline, but do you start there?

Well, persuasion and many other trial consultants and books would tell you, maybe not, because maybe we always want to be focusing on the actions of our defendant. And so we start with a point on our timeline that begins focusing on the actions of the defendant. OK, so boom, we’re already doing some persuasion there. Where you end, obviously, some people would end with the events that brought them there. Sometimes you go a little bit further. Either way, you are

creating something that is very familiar to people. Again, making it easy on our brains, that cognitive ease. They see a timeline that, oh, this is familiar. I’m going to get this. And it has like placing the information in a sequence so that they don’t have to hold it in their brain because most of the time our timelines are going to be a little longer than four or five points. If you can make them that short, great. But most of the time we have a few other things that have to go on there. And so having it

Organized and holding a place on a piece of paper in an order is very, very persuasive and helpful for folks. Also, you will find that if you have a really great timeline, you can use it with many different witnesses. And again, you can make it fancy. Hire a company to create you a fancy PowerPoint. You can keep it super simple and just literally draw it on a notepad. Don’t overthink this. However, just know that when people

Elizabeth Larrick (04:37.528)
think about a timeline, especially our audiences, they’re gonna think about it like you would see it with a timeline and events popping up, Not necessarily a list, okay? So this is sometimes where we get a little bit confused. I will ask lawyers, hey, you have a timeline and they send me basically a Word document or a PDF that it’s just a list in order. That’s a list, not timeline, okay? So remember, it’s literally time on a line, okay? So number one point would be use a timeline.

wherever you may be, right? Even if you’re just arguing emotion about discovery, like that back and forth, they can get Huisynthesimil and Huisynthesimil, like put it on, make it easy for the court to see how hard you have been working to get that confer and get that information, okay? Use that timeline. So my other very simple idea for court persuasion is to get one of those giant notepads and write on it.

I mean, this is so simple, but it is so overlooked and generally complicated by lawyers. When I ask people to do this, they generally look at me and the first thing that they say is, I have terrible handwriting. It’s okay. Because here’s what happens when you stop what you’re doing in the courtroom and you move over to that notepad and you begin to write, you have the full attention.

of everyone because they don’t know what you’re about to write and they want to know, right? It’s like the mystery in the room. Okay. So you have their full attention, which is really hard to do. If you’ve sat and watched any kind of trials recently or even in your own, you’re going to notice there are folks who are just not paying attention. They’re off in La La Land, but no one’s talking. Everyone’s watching you right out, right on this notepad. And if you’ve been to Mark Lanier’s Trial Academy, he has a whole.

fancy, I’m going to call it an Elmo, where basically he does the same thing, right? Puts a white sheet of paper up there, these black fancy pens, and he writes, right? And he knows that folks are watching with bated breath what he is doing. He has their attention. They want to know what’s coming next. This is so simple, right? It doesn’t have to be a roadmap like he does. It could be as simple as just a checklist with one or two words on it. Draw a T chart with before and after.

Elizabeth Larrick (06:50.194)
or even just points from a testimony as summary. mean, this is one of the easiest places where when people are working with their clients on direct exam or an expert on direct exam, you got to switch it up. Otherwise, people really will be falling asleep. But using writing on that giant notepad will significantly help. Plus, what I have found when I’ve used this is and save that notepad and bring it back for closing. Remember what we heard from our client? We heard from our plaintiff here who said

This is how long this lasted and here were these numbers on our pain scale and here are the things that they did, right? it all comes back. okay, great. And instead of me just saying it out loud, it was right there. They could have read it themselves. okay, I remember when you’re writing all that. that’s true, right? And so the other thing that happens is when you write it down, it becomes much more concrete in their memory. They’re having to remember whole bunch of stuff and that notepad can make it really easy.

right, to keep their attention. And also you write down the words that of course have the most persuasion, okay? Again, thinking through these things, but if you haven’t thought and you’re just going on the fly, get that T-chart up there, get that checklist going, or again, just write points from testimony to summarize what someone has been saying, but very, very helpful and super persuasive. The last idea, again, I’m not telling you anything you guys don’t already know. This is fantastic stuff, but it generally gets a little…

lost in the shuffle of when we are getting ready for trial, and that is putting things into the system of threes, right? So again, thinking through our how we learn in our story, like story format beginning, middle, end, So three points, right? Keeping it down to just three points. Think about the title of this podcast episode, three simple ideas, okay? Why are threes? Well, they have found

that three is the smallest number to create a pattern in our brains. And our brains love to look for patterns. They also know that really our brains can only hold typically three to seven things at a time. And I would say three to five. But now at this point where we are and now it’s 2025, I would say three is it, okay? That’s pretty much all we can hold in our short-term memory. So we don’t wanna overwhelm it. The lovely thing about the rule of three is it really helps you as a lawyer be able to…

Elizabeth Larrick (09:13.002)
really fine tune and cut the fluff. And these are the top three things. Okay. So think about going through your opening statement, top three things. Think about doing your direct exam. Here are the top three things. Cross exam, top three things. And that doesn’t mean that you can’t have like sub points, but I think what you want to be able to do is be able to simplify for your audience point number one, timelines. And then I went into it, right? Point number two, writing on the notepad, right?

Then I went into it so that it’s easy. You’re going to remember all three of these things. You’re also going to say Elizabeth is not original. Of course, it’s not. Say that it was. But simple, right? Three simple ideas is what we came here for this episode, because what I want to remind you is that it is easy and it’s not too late. Even if you are starting trial next week, OK, you still have time to put together a timeline that has five events on it. Get out that notepad and write two or four or three things on it, right?

look at your organization of your information and put it into the rule of threes. okay? make it simple for your audience. and that way they can keep it in their working memory. okay? and they’ll tell it to each other. right? that’s why when we look at some of the the trial strategy on opening statements and our CLEs, they typically go and use the rule of threes. right? three safety rules. okay? you can have more or less, right? but three safety rules. right?

When we talk about preparing folks for trial, maybe it’d their trial testimony or depot testimony, we try to push things into three points. Again, we just want to make sure because that’s what people remember. Okay, now three simple ideas that it is not too late for your courtroom persuasion. And if I were you, you could use all three. Okay, these do not necessarily crowd the other, okay? And number one would be a timeline.

got several events, which you normally do in your case. Please use a timeline. Help your audience be able to hold the points in reference to each other. That’s also really helpful for a comparison, okay? Next one, it’d be to write on that giant notepad. Figure out a way to make a checklist. Make a T-chart, for and after, right? You can just writing up simple words from testimony will help keep people’s attention, keep it focused. And again, if you take that extra step and think through, like, okay, you’re gonna have a very persuasive.

Elizabeth Larrick (11:35.156)
exhibit in front of the jury that’s going to stand up there. And last, of course, which is our system of threes. Thinking through our presentation, how can we get it into three main points to make it easy for our short-term memory to keep it and for our brain to connect it as a pattern? All right. I hope that these were helpful. They were either gentle reminders or if they were new, that’s awesome as well. Again, if you’ve worked with me, you know I’m always going to be creating a timeline for you, whether

most of the time for focus groups and even with our opening statements. One of the best examples that we talked about was with Michelle Gesner in episode 129, where we looked at her case and saw she needed two timelines. Go back and revisit that episode. I will put a link in the show notes for you so you can go back and re-listen to us talk about that and why we felt, oh, this is really necessary and who to use it with. So that was one of the things too that can be persuasive. All right.

Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. And don’t forget, if you are interested, I have a trial lawyer prep newsletter. If you want to join that, you get one email a month, try not to bug you all too much, with extra tips and strategies for preparation of your cases, maybe focus groups, witness prep, trial strategy. Each month, you will find that link in the show notes, or you can go on over to lyricallawfirm.com slash connect to fill out that. All right, thank you so much for tuning in.

And until next time, thank you.

Join Elizabeth Larrick as she shares insights on developing trial strategies that resonate with juries. This episode is designed for trial lawyers seeking to enhance their courtroom success by focusing on a comprehensive strategy rather than just meeting deadlines or relying on emotional narratives. Elizabeth delves into the importance of using focus groups to anticipate jury reactions and prepare multiple contingency plans for trial preparation.

Gain tips on crafting compelling narratives, prioritizing crucial information, and employing strategic questioning. Learn how to sequence witnesses and evidence to streamline your courtroom presentation. Elizabeth emphasizes the significance of flexibility in your plans to handle unexpected challenges. 

In this episode, you will hear:

• Understanding trial strategy beyond deadlines and persuasive elements
• Importance of a cohesive, big-picture plan considering the jury’s perspective
• Utilizing focus groups to predict jury reactions and develop contingency plans
• Crafting memorable and clear narratives through effective communication 
• Strategic sequencing of witnesses and evidence to streamline presentations
• Simplifying and prioritizing information for impactful trial presentations

Follow and Review:

We’d love for you to follow us if you haven’t yet. Click that purple ‘+’ in the top right corner of your Apple Podcasts app. We’d love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast.

Supporting Resources:

Be sure to check out the Michelle Gessner episodes to hear about her trial strategy formulated from the focus groups.

Episode 128

Episode 129

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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:

Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I’m your host Elizabeth Larrick, and we have a new episode today talking about trial strategy, what it is.

and what it is not. This episode is prepared for you so that you can be able to clearly [00:01:00] assess what you need for your upcoming trial and to create an overall plan of action so that everybody on the team can stay focused on the targets in order to get that win on the verdict form. and avoid getting caught in the weeds.

You’re getting ready for trial. Maybe it’s 30 days out. Maybe it’s two weeks out. Maybe you’ve got 60 days or more. Either way, you may be sitting down and asking yourself, okay, how do we win this thing? And what can happen is we get super caught up in the deadlines and the motions and the last minute questions about settlement.

And we can sometimes push things like strategy aside. And so what trial strategy is not, is meeting your deadlines. It’s not doing those depo line designations or writing out those motions in Lemony, right? That’s totally in the weeds, right? All those [00:02:00] things are necessary and needed, but those are all kind of things that sometimes we use forms for, or sometimes we may or may not win those, right?

Depo designations, judge may decide something different. Motions in limine, judge could decide something different. And we don’t necessarily want to create a trial strategy around things, meaning testimony or evidence that may or may not come in. Because if we create an entire strategy around one piece of testimony or one piece of evidence, And then it doesn’t happen.

We have to really, really scramble. And definitely when we talk about trial strategy, we want to have plan A, plan B, plan C. Okay, that’s just being a good trial lawyer, making sure we can get everything in. But trial strategy is not sitting down to do those DEPA line designations and that, you know, jury instruction form, or worrying about how to fix one witness, or, you know, Really, what I see sometimes as people think trial strategy is basically how [00:03:00] can I talk more persuasively?

How can I really rest on things that are in the case, meaning maybe it’s a sympathetic picture, or maybe it’s really sad stories, or really egregious injuries. Those things are definitely part of strategy, but they are not the entire strategy. And unfortunately, I see that happen at times where people just believe, well, this is powerful enough.

I don’t need a strategy for anything else. This is all I need. This is just as persuasive as it’s going to get. People are just going to automatically roll over when they see this picture, or they hear the sad story, or they. Understand this complicated medical surgery, people are way more complicated than that.

And what I want you to do is be able to sit down no matter where you are with your experience, no matter where you are with your trial and getting prepared and sit down to look at creating an overall cohesive plan of action to win. And making it simple on you and your team and so that you won’t get [00:04:00] distracted along the way.

So, really, what is trial strategy? Okay, well, strategy overall, like we talked about, is a plan of action to achieve a win or achieve an overall goal. So, it’s really this, this big, overarching, cohesive, think about like a 30, 000 foot view. Okay, because again, if we get down in the weeds about this piece of testimony or this, like, We’re missing the strategy.

Okay. We’re too far in the weeds. You need to pull all the way back. And trial strategy really comes from a compilation of your focus groups because trial strategy really sits down and looks at things through the point of view of the jury. All right. And always thinking through, okay, if they see this picture, if they see this testimony from my client, how are they going to perceive that?

And If you’ve done focus groups, obviously you can compile all those together. If you’ve not done focus groups, you can still sit down and look at it and say, okay, [00:05:00] what’s the point of view here of the jury? Not me, not what I think about it, but what they’re going to think and how they’re going to perceive it.

And that’s really a big key point of your strategy is just making sure to look at it. It’s like, okay, how are they going? To see this, are they going to be just overall annoyed? Are they going to be overall confused? And how do we fix that? Right? Because that’s where you really want to be able to come in with your trial strategy and say, okay, knowing what I know about this entire file, which is a lot of information, what are the top three things that.

We have to win that. We have to get in so that we can get that W on the verdict form. And how do we sequence the information that we have our witnesses, our evidence, our documents to get a W again on that jury verdict? Because we can. Provide all the information to someone to make a decision, and they maybe [00:06:00] don’t know how to sequence things well, or maybe they don’t know how to sequence things.

Well, a jury doesn’t have that luxury. They have to sit and they have to listen and take in a lot of information in a format that is very, very foreign to 99 percent of us. Okay, because we are Okay. in that learning environment anymore. Most of us don’t go to school every day or sit down and listen to a lecture.

And that’s really what jurors have to do. They have to sit down, go from zero to 60 on your case, and have to put it all together. And if we don’t do our job to give it the best sequence, the best order, We are really missing out on a big piece of strategy because we get to go first, right? So we have this large primacy effect where we get to set the stage.

And one of those things that makes a huge difference for. And so that is one of the biggest pieces of trial [00:07:00] strategy is really thinking through your sequence of evidence. Best example we can talk about is here recently with my episode interview with Michelle Gessner and episodes 128 and 129, where she learned from her focus groups that.

Number one had to be those H. R. notes, right? That was her number one key point. Number one piece of evidence. And so she had to make sure and get that out and in front of them very quickly and clearly. And she learned that from her focus groups. And if you’ll remember again from that episode or those two episodes, she did small bites at focus groups.

She did one hour here and one hour there and one over there. So there weren’t these really long mock juries or really long focus groups. That allowed her to be able to go back and test again. And in working with Michelle, we really used the time in between focus groups to look at our strategy. Is it working?

Is it not working? [00:08:00] How do we retest this? What’s missing, right? I mean, what are we missing here? Because again, we can all get stuck in the weeds if we feel really good about something and forget to test other things. And that leads me to the other part of strategy, which is simplifying, removing, cutting information, getting down to the simplest, clearest case that you possibly can.

What do you need to get rid of, right? Because we want to make sure that we can be quick about our trials. Joe Fried talks about having quick trials, right? Folks, have Not a lot of patients. If you’ve been to the courthouse lately, people have very, very little patience. And so we want to make sure that we can get to the point as quickly as possible.

And that’s really the next important key. That’s the next. Key essential in trial strategy communication, how are you going to communicate these key points thinking through your witnesses, right? Thinking through [00:09:00] questions in direct exam, thinking through cross exam, right? And how can we continue to teach them this point through visual aids?

Maybe it’s even just writing it on a notepad, having a checklist, right? What images can we use? What metaphors can we pair with our key points? Maybe there are pictures in the case, maybe there aren’t. Maybe there are pictures we can draw, right? But we always want to make sure that we’re remembering how can we teach them and make it sticky.

May it get stick in there. Because again, they’re going to get a lot of information and we want to make sure that we don’t give them too much, confuse them, all right, or give them something that doesn’t go anywhere. That’s one of the key things that I always talk to lawyers about when we talk about opening statements and we’re even just giving a presentation with our focus groups.

And that is you gave them a piece of information and they didn’t know where to put it. And what happens is sometimes our brain just holds onto it to keep trying to put it somewhere. And we waste a lot of energy and a lot of time, like, and our jurors still [00:10:00] like, where did this go? Right? You’ll hear that in your focus group feedback.

Where did this go? Well, I heard this, but I never heard where, like, what was the resolution of that? And you’re thinking, we don’t need to be talking about that. That is how much people will grab ahold of something if it doesn’t fit. So always make sure that. When you are communicating, you have the essentials and ditch the rest, okay?

Because sometimes we can pick what we need for our opening statement and we can save the rest for cross exam. We can save the rest for direct exam. There are a lot of things in our cases that need more explanation than we can give in an opening statement. And that’s another thing that you can really gain from doing focus groups is learning, Oh.

We didn’t give him enough information for that, so let’s save that. Maybe that’s for a direct exam. Or, you know what, that actually needs to be paired with this document and this visual aid, right? Okay, well then it needs more explanation, then let’s take out an opening statement, because we just really don’t want to confuse anybody right off the [00:11:00] bat.

Because if we make things simple, right, then we’re, we’re keying in on our cognitive ease, our brain shortcuts. That can be made versus if we present something that’s very confusing, it looks very complicated, our brains are naturally just going to kind of, it’s going to resist that because we’re going to try and making it work harder than it already is.

All right. So thinking through trial strategy, here are a couple of questions that you can sit down and think about, write it out, round table it with, you know, folks on your team who are going to be trying the case with you. But I found that these couple of questions really kind of help us sit down and create at least a little bit of a strategy so we can stay on point when we get into the courtroom.

And that is number one, how will the jury perceive my case? Number two, what is the best sequence of witnesses and documents evidence for the jury? Number three, what am I missing that the jury is gonna hate? What am I missing that the jury would love? Number four, how can I [00:12:00] teach the jury quickly and efficiently?

Is that with a visual aid, a checklist, using a notepad, metaphors, words? And number five, what can I cut out of my case to make it clear? And simple. What’s the fluff that we don’t even need? All right. So, sit down, do a little trial strategy, see if it helps, right? Because we want to make sure that we’re using all of our information from our focus groups, okay?

If you’re curious about how to squeeze as much as we can out of our focus group, go back and listen to episode 130 where we talk about maximizing our focus group feedback and ways to do that. And again, even if you haven’t done focus groups, right, you can sit down and ask these questions and look at you, look at your file, and be able to say, okay, I can still create a strategy here, I can still come up with the best sequence of evidence, and I will tell you, the earlier you can do this, the easier it will be [00:13:00] on witness scheduling.

Okay, sometimes I see a pitfall if people don’t do this particular thought process. And then it just comes down to, well, Betsy’s available only on Tuesdays and Dr. So and so’s only can do Thursdays. And you kind of have this mishmash where you’re not putting together the best sequence of evidence. You’re just throwing together availability.

And when things are out of order, It’s really hard for the jury. You can say that. We’re going out of order. Okay, great. You know that. The judge understands. The defense counsel, the jury is like, what do you mean out of order? Because they don’t know, like, they don’t know what your order is. Okay. Everybody else in the room does, but they don’t.

So if you can do this early, then you can really sit down and think, okay, I really got to have this person first. Okay. They are key. I got to have them go first. And if it’s not a possibility, or. If, again, going back to listening to Michelle Gessner in her interview, one of the key persons she wanted to go first was going to be a defense witness.

[00:14:00] And she didn’t know if she was going to be available on day one. So she created a plan B. And plan B was still important and it laid the foundation. But of course, plan A would have been to have Art, that defense witness, go first. But it didn’t actually work out. So she had plan B, which was, let’s lay a foundation here.

Just as important, we’ve already got out what we need to get out in opening say, but we’re going to get to the good, good juicy stuff, but laying that foundation would allow a little bit more time before we get to our essential point that she needed for her trial. So, plan A, plan B, right, to allow some flexibility, but to also know that you’re putting together the best sequence possible for your trial strategy.

All right. I will put a link in the show notes to episodes 129 for Michelle Gessner. If you haven’t listened to those yet, they are great. She talks about her focus groups and putting things together for her trial for her big verdict against Wells Fargo. And if you didn’t know, I actually have a trial lawyer prep newsletter that runs once a month to [00:15:00] your email inbox.

If you’re curious and want to join, please look at the link in the show notes for that as well. It’s also at Larrick law firm. com slash connect. All right. Thank you so much for tuning in and until next time, thank you.

In this episode of Trial Lawyer Prep, Elizabeth Larrick discusses the importance of immediate and thorough reflection on focus group feedback for trial lawyers. She emphasizes early recording of impressions, detailed review within seven days, and actionable steps to improve trial strategies. Elizabeth shares her methods for compiling and analyzing data to ensure focus group insights are effectively utilized in courtroom preparations.

00:00 Introduction to Trial Lawyer Prep

00:40 Welcome and Episode Overview

00:53 The Importance of Reflection in Jury Research

02:39 Immediate Reflection After Focus Groups

06:28 Seven-Day Reflection and Analysis

10:03 Implementing Feedback and Next Steps

16:08 Conclusion and Additional Resources

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Episode Transcript

 [00:00:00] Welcome to Trial Lawyer Prep. What if you could hang out with trial lawyers and jury consultants? Ask them about connecting with clients and juries more effectively. Then take strategies, tactics, and insights to increase your success. Each week, Elizabeth Larrick takes an in depth look at how to regain touch with the everyday world, understand the emotional burden of your clients and juries, and use focus groups in this process.

Elizabeth is an experienced trial lawyer, consultant, and founder of Larrick Law Firm in Austin, Texas. Her goal is to help you connect with juries and clients in order to improve your abilities in the courtroom. Now, here’s Elizabeth. Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I am glad you’re here. I am your host, Elizabeth. And if you’re joining me today, it is January 1st, 2025.

And. As usual, kind of the end of the year, I thought it would be a great episode to talk about reflection, but more [00:01:00] importantly, talk about using reflection to get the most out of your jury research. Here’s the thing. You spend time and money and energy running focus groups and mock juries to understand better what juries are thinking and what they want to know about your case.

And sometimes all we really want to know is Do we win or do we not win? But what I want to do is give you an episode to talk about how to get the most out of your focus groups. Because what I see so much in lawyers is you get your initial impression and then you just move on and I really don’t want you to miss out on going deeper and getting the most out of what you receive from your focus groups so that you can Use it better and more effectively in your cases,

maybe you are getting ready for trial. Maybe you’ve just done a focus group for mediation. , maybe you’re deciding whether to take a [00:02:00] case or not. Even in all those places, you can learn so much more about what the focus group is giving you and that feedback. If we take a little time to do some reflection.

Now, this episode of course comes out of my own personal reflections in looking at working with lawyers in 2024 and of course the many years before that with focus groups and where folks are missing the mark. And again, don’t want you to do that. You use all this energy and time to create these things, to work, , with others in doing them.

So let’s talk very quickly and make a brief episode here. Point number one. So important to do an immediate reflection after your focus group or mock jury. I see so many lawyers who just finish up and pack up their stuff or leave the zoom and don’t take those moments right after you [00:03:00] finish a focus group to reflect and put their thoughts down on paper.

Yes, of course, all of our focus groups are recorded. However, I rarely see lawyers go back and actually re watch their focus groups. So, if you are going to add any kind of step after your focus groups, after your jury research, it would be to stop what you are doing, sit down, and do an immediate reflection.

Because in even as little as 24 hours, our memory begins to fade, right? That’s just kind of how our brains work. We have to take in new information. So you want to sit down while it is fresh, right? Those immediate things on your brain and write it down, write down those takeaways. Of course, if you have others there with you, that is a great time to sit down and have just a super brief discussion.

And this is what I do with all of the lawyers who work with me in my [00:04:00] focus groups, because I think it is so invaluable to have even a quick discussion after you finish your focus group to ask, what do you think they understood? What do you think they missed? Where do you think they were confused? What surprised you?

What didn’t you hear? that you thought you would hear. Because, , we walk into all of our focus groups testing different facts, testing different evidence, testing sequence , of information, testing our witnesses. And we come in with our preconceived notions. We think, Oh, that particular defense is going to work really well.

Maybe it’s social media posts. Maybe it’s pictures of somebody. Doing a handstand, those have totally happened by the way, and you want to know, oh, those are definitely going to have traction. Well, you already come in as a lawyer and as somebody creating these focus groups [00:05:00] with a preconceived expectation about what they’re going to say.

Did they say it or did they not? You know, that’s kind of one of those things where we can look at when you create your focus group plan and your goals and what are you testing? Like what is a hundred percent going to be in your presentation? That should be a hundred percent. The question you’re asking after you finish, what did I hear about that particular topic?

So many a times when I work with lawyers, what I get back when we do this reflection, this immediate debrief discussion is Oh, well, I didn’t have enough time to give them X information. I always try to bring people back to the core of, I just want to know what is your brain telling you right now about what they get?

What was this feedback that you heard? Because what is so important when you have a round table and you have multiple people to bounce things off is what you’ll hear is. You know, Bobby Joe over here heard that [00:06:00] it was bad, but then, you know, Susie said it was good, so then it’s like, oh, wow, everybody heard a little something different.

Well, who did you hear that from, right? And now you can actually kind of really be able to see and put some things together about different participants, what they’re saying and where it may have come from, because that’s that next level of being able to reflect on what you heard about And why you may have heard it.

And having other people in that immediate reflection time is also very important. Naturally, you want to record all that good stuff too, because the next step in reflection would be to go within the next seven days of your focus group and take a look at the transcript. Take a look at the chat. If you’re virtual or if it’s in person, look at those paper votes.

What was actually written down in the transcript? reactions to the questions. And [00:07:00] what I like to do is compile that information into a chart or enter a table, because when I do that, , creating a memo or creating a report, however you want to label it, but just basically taking that information and taking it from all the separate little places and putting it into one.

So you can really compare what they actually wrote down, what they actually put or said. And when you’re able to do that, your brain. Oh, you get a whole nother level of reflection because you’ve got your initial immediate thoughts and takeaways. Now, when you’re actually going back within those seven days and looking at, Oh, this is really what they said.

Oh, wow. Everybody actually wrote down this same point or something very, very similar. Oh, okay. And how are those people then talking about it? Because one of the good things about having A chat or having in person votes is you can take those what they actually wrote down or what [00:08:00] they typed and then compare it to what they said in discussion to really see.

Did they tell me the truth? Were they actually giving me a true answer to something, or were they just telling me what I wanted to hear? That’s a very good way to check to make sure, okay, was this a good focus group, or did they just tell me what I wanted to hear? Because they’ll trip up somewhere in between those two things.

And the other thing you can do, too, is look at what you presented. Maybe it was an opening statement, or maybe it was a PowerPoint. And in comparison with what they wrote, what they typed, what they said in discussion, , were there pieces where, Oh, you know what? That’s probably why they said that. I added this fact into the timeline, or we mentioned this in the opening statement.

I can hear that reflected in what they’re saying. So then you’re able to really see connections better on the information and then compare it to what your initial thoughts were. Because many of times what will happen is in our initial takeaway. Our brains will get hung up on maybe one comment and typically that comment is negative.[00:09:00]

And then when we go back and we look at in , our seven day reflection, we can see , Oh, that was just one particular person saying the same thing over and over and over again, that my brain got ahold of. Nobody else was saying that. And that way we’d say, okay, so don’t because you don’t want to take action in your case based on one comment from one person that nobody else in the group took ahold of.

That is the danger of what you could be missing out on if you don’t do this extra reflection. So again, the other thing we can do is write down at this point, , we’ve done our immediate reflection, we’ve done our seven day reflection where we’ve really compiled all the thoughts, all the information into a one document.

You can call it a memo, call it a report, but just put it all in one place so it’s easy to find. We need to go back and look at it, but then also that really tells you, okay, what do we test next? What’s the next step for this case and what do we need to retest? And what do we need to [00:10:00] do new for the next one?

 And finally, what I like to do is make. an immediate list of changes or steps that need to be taken for the information. , for example, if you did an opening statement, Go in and immediately start putting in those edits or put in those comments so that you can begin to work it into your opening statement.

If you need to create a timeline, go ahead and put that in there. Or if you did create a timeline, move things around, go ahead and make those changes right now while that feedback is fresh on your mind. And then sometimes I will put in a comment, if you’re working in Word, so that I know, Oh, this is where that comes from.

So if I try to change it back or somebody comes and change it again, they can know, Oh, that’s, that came from that focus group where we, we mentioned this. The other thing to do is make a list of action steps for discovery. For example, if the focus group told [00:11:00] you things that they wanted to hear or see, now you need to go ask for that request for production, go ask for that interrogatory.

Or maybe you need to go talk to your expert who’s about to give a deposition or maybe you are creating questions for your deposition for this fact witness you’ve immediately gotten that feedback. And more importantly, what will happen is you can actually use the language that the focus group gave you versus you using lawyer words,

 It if you don’t make this list, it’s typically it’s lost, right? What I see a lot of times is lawyers will run focus groups.

We’ll have a memo or report. We’ll have it all in one place. And then we come back together to get ready for an opening statement or we get ready for the next focus group. I’ll say, okay, well, did you go and get that thing that the focus group wanted? Did you ask that expert for that? Did you, and they’re like, Oh, No, no, we didn’t.

I was like, okay, well, it’s lost, right? We don’t want, I don’t want you to lose that. I want you to be able to have that [00:12:00] information and immediately take those steps. That’s the whole purpose of the focus group, right? To not only help us better understand the way the jury thinks, but to help us now shape our case to how they think and how they expect to see this information.

The other thing you can do as well, along with making a list of steps To take or making those immediately changes to your presentation is to do a comparison to your other focus groups. This is something I enjoy doing for my lawyers that work with me on multiple focus groups is we basically end up doing kind of a large visual chart.

Again, you know how I love to make visual aids, but if we can put things in a way where our eyes can really see them right next to each other, who were the jurors that were good profiles, who were the negative profiles, and be able to just really see that, Oh, okay.

Oh, and that when we tested this, Oh, but the next focus group, we took it out. We didn’t put that in. And how did that really change things? That is really helpful for us because, , when we’re coming down [00:13:00] to trial, we’re synthesizing a lot of information, plus new information that is coming across from opposing counsel.

And so to be able to have that, , document where everything is beside itself is extremely helpful to quickly. analyze and then make very quick decisions on things that you need to put into jury selection or opening statement or direct exam cross exam. So recently we had two focus groups on a particular file and we did them two months apart and ran two kind of different styles of focus group.

One was very kind of exploratory, what are the concepts and themes, and the other one was very much directed with a very specific presentation about. The facts and evidence in the case. And what we were able to do is basically look for recurring themes and retest things that we heard that we believe to be positive,

and what that really helped was guide , Oh, did we see it? Did we hear [00:14:00] it? And then have a lot of confidence, , Oh, we did it. So this needs to be included 100%. And , when you’re able to really dive into the focus group feedback, then you can really use it again for the next one.

And then again, gain a lot of confidence, in what is positive for your case. And you will also hear what is dragging down, your case as well. I don’t want you to miss this step. I want you to be able to really get the most out of your focus groups. And so plan the time, right?

You work really hard on the front end. You prepare, you spend money and energy getting ready for these focus groups. Take that extra 30 minutes, right after and just book that on your calendar so that , okay, immediately once I, walk out of that room, those focus group participants leave that room, or I get out, exit out of that Zoom, I’m going to immediately go and write down my thoughts.

And again, this is not a [00:15:00] detailed, what did everybody say list. This is, what are my takeaways? Again, answering those simple questions. What did they understand? What did they not understand? What did they miss? That’s generally always a really good question is what do we give them that they didn’t even talk about?

And then, of course, taking another step of reflection within the seven days to really look at what they actually typed or wrote down for us, in response to directed questions and looking back at that transcript, looking at our presentations, and then putting everything into one document, being either a memo or report, whatever you want to title it, and then being able to go back and compare our initial thoughts with what was actually typed in or said in the transcript.

And of course, that last point, which is taking those immediate steps, we’re making a list, of steps and actions that need to be taken to get the focus group, those folks, what they needed to hear or see or talk to your experts [00:16:00] or your witnesses, even to make sure that that testimony is not lost, but it’s going to be given over to the focus group.

All right. I hope that you enjoyed this episode and take a little more time to do reflection after your focus groups and jury research until next time. Thank you so much. And don’t forget, I do have a monthly trial lawyer prep newsletter. If you’d like to join, check the show notes for the link. All right.

Until next time. Thank you.

Join us as we delve into the remarkable $22 million verdict achieved by trial lawyer Michelle Gessner against Wells Fargo. Michelle shares her strategic approach to a high-stakes case involving the wrongful termination of a Wells Fargo employee who requested a work-from-home accommodation under the ADA. This episode is packed with insights for trial lawyers, highlighting the value of focus groups in shaping trial strategy and boosting confidence. Discover how focus groups can refine your opening statements and jury selection, even when limited to a 20-minute voir dire. Michelle also discusses the challenges of maintaining focus group confidentiality when faced with aggressive tactics from opposing counsel. Gain valuable knowledge on navigating complex litigation and learn how meticulous preparation can make a significant difference in your courtroom success.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Lessons learned from Michelle Gessner’s landmark $22 million verdict against Wells Fargo.
• Leveraging focus groups to build confidence in trial strategies and understand juror perceptions.
• Utilizing focus groups to refine opening statements and determine the most impactful evidence presentation.
• Protecting focus group footage from opposing counsel’s access attempts and maintaining its confidentiality.

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Supporting Resources:

Learn more about Michelle Gessner at: https://www.mgessnerlaw.com/michelle-gessner/#gref

You can reach out to Michelle Gessner via email: michelle@mgessnerlaw.com

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Episode Credits

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Episode Transcript:

 Hello, Elizabeth here. I wanna jump in really quickly before we begin this episode. To let you know it will be broken into two parts. Michelle Gesner and I had a wonderful discussion about her $22 million. Verdict against Wells Fargo and it got a little lengthy, so [00:01:00] we’d broke it into two parts.

I hope you enjoy both of those, Michelle Gesner practices out of Charlotte, North Carolina, and her contact information and bio will be linked in the show notes of both episodes. Hope you enjoy. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. I’m your host, Elizabeth Lyric, and we have a special guest today and she’s special because I got to work alongside with her.

And Michelle Gesner is here to talk about her. Very impressive $22 million verdict. So Michelle, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Of course. We are all dying to know more about this verdict, but before we get there, let’s talk and give everybody a little bit of context about the case so that when we start talking about focus groups and other things, we get a little bit more understanding of what’s happening.

Give us a couple sentences about what this case was about. Sure. So I had the privilege of representing a long tenured employee who [00:02:00] worked for Wells Fargo for 25 years. In which that when he was right outta high school, had suffered a horrific accident where he had fallen off of a balcony and broken his back and compressed his spine.

Fortunately, he was able to regain use of his legs, and so to look at him, you do not see a disability, but he definitely has a disability. He has a paralyzed colon and a paralyzed bladder, which requires medical assistance in order to relieve himself. So the case is about that. He had asked for an accommodation from Wells Fargo formally asked using their formal internal processes in to be allowed to work from home 75% of the time in order to mitigate his disability.

And some might say why 75% of the time his job required at least 25% of travel. He was a salesman. He not for the lighthearted, was able to self mitigate for short periods of time in [00:03:00] order to travel or to be away from home or order to do business. But day to day he needed some an accommodation in order to help him to be able to go to the bathroom with dignity.

So he asked for an accommodation. While everyone was working at home during COVID, he was asking to continue to do 75% of the time when everybody else had to go back to the office and Wells Fargo said no. The human resources notes were critical in this case in which that they management told her no.

When she suggested that they at least try an accommodation management told her that would be delaying the inevitable. As a result, Wells Fargo terminated this employee and they did it using a reduction in force, so another word for a layoff. So they had a policy that required them to have five months lead time in order to add someone to a layoff or a reduction in force.

And when they found out he needed an accommodation. They [00:04:00] slid him in in eight days and fired him. And so that was the facts that the jury heard in this case and the evidence that they saw in the human resources notes leading to the verdict that you just described. Gotcha. And I know because I have a little behind the scenes knowledge that you guys had a total tug of war on this litigation back and forth with Wells Fargo.

Is that true? Absolutely. Again, another thing not for the faint of heart is Wells Fargo Foss tooth and nail on every single thing. It doesn’t take much. You can do a search of all the law, 360 articles, and you’ll see every battle along the way. And because it was Wells Fargo, it was not only played out in the court, but it also was played out in the news.

And we should also say this is happening in Charlotte, so this is where the headquarters, if you will, for Wells Fargo. There’s lots of folks in the community as well. So it got a lot swirling going along in Charlotte. [00:05:00] And so you decided somewhere along the way to use focus groups for this case. So walk us through like that process of why, and then really then we’ll dive into when you started to use them.

Sure. And if anybody knows anything about Elizabeth Lyric, she knows focus groups. And so luckily I have been a student and have learned along the way how valuable focus groups are. So in this case, and in most all of my cases, we start focus groups early. And to just start at the beginning, the first focus group I did was just a, a narrative to find out how’s the jury gonna respond to this neutral set of facts.

Here is a gentleman who had worked his way up the ranks, if you will. He made a lot of money in bonus money because he made a lot of money for Wells Fargo. And under the facts and circumstances of this case, how is a jury gonna respond? So we just did a test, the water focus group, to begin and learned so much.

[00:06:00] Learned about. How are they gonna react to somebody at his level? How are they gonna react to this disability? How do they react generally to Wells Fargo? We’re not talking about a small mom and pop, we’re talking about a Fortune 35 company that’s very well known. And what are their expectations of a company of that size, particularly one that is, provides a a service, they’re service oriented, a bank.

And people choose where they bank and so how are they gonna react? So we learned a lot from the beginning, just doing a narrative focus group and ended up doing roughly 10 to 12 focus groups before we went to trial. Mm-hmm. And I know also, again, I got a behind the scenes look here that you guys had, what some people would.

Be like, why would you start early? And what I’m trying to get to is you guys had a big stall in getting a lot of documentation, so you guys really didn’t know a hundred percent of really the facts of what happened until well into [00:07:00] deposition. Why would you go ahead and do a focus group before getting all kind of the documents?

That’s a great question. So part of it was just to test what we did know and to test what we knew from the plaintiff and the plaintiff himself. How are people gonna respond to him? And some of the things that we did know, but to your point, Wells Fargo strategically. Chose to take the plaintiff’s deposition to take my client’s deposition before they turned over any of what I would call some of the most critical documents, including the notes from the A DA coordinator who had documented every conversation that she had.

Some would say that was intentional. They didn’t want him to have the benefit of what they already knew in their own files before he was deposed. So certainly the perspective even preparing. My client for his deposition and any focus group that we did before his deposition, we were in the dark. He obviously had.

A hunch that more was [00:08:00] going on behind the scenes because of how everything unfolded. But like all employees, we don’t know what’s going on behind the curtains unless we sue and get discovery. And even then you have to fight often to get everything. So starting early, there was more of what we had to carry.

Again, think about how is the jury gonna respond to this person? How is the jury gonna respond to this set of facts? How is the jury gonna respond because it’s Wells Fargo? How are they gonna respond because of where the case will get tried In Charlotte, where Wells Fargo is a large employer, how are all of those things going to be impacted at trial?

All of which don’t necessarily have anything to do with what we’re gonna get from them in discovery. Mm-hmm. Did it change? Absolutely. And so again, we can talk about it, why we did so many different focus groups, but initially being able to structure the case and to know what to ask for, and to know where to focus.[00:09:00] 

The focus groups helped us tremendously because those are the people who are gonna be sitting in the box and who are gonna be our jurors and our perspective really doesn’t matter. It’s their perspective that matters. You’re doing ’em all virtual too, right? Yes. A hundred percent virtual. Yeah. Yeah. And so you guys get this big dump of information and makes things, uh, a lot better case.

What? 10 to 12 focus groups? That’s a wholly moly lot. For, I would say any case, however, we got a $22 million case. Okay. Walk us through what do you, after you, some narratives, you get all this information. Sure. Where do you go next with your focus groups? Sure. I’m a little bit of a novice when it comes to focus groups, so I enlisted help when I could, such as yourself, and when you change one thing in a focus group.

You can see right away how it changes their response. And I only know that from doing 10 to 12. So lemme give you an example. I think I tested my opening maybe six or seven [00:10:00] times and I tested some other things along the way. Part of that was testing how did I need to give them the facts of this case?

What needed to come first? What perspective did I need to focus on? Was it from the standpoint or the viewpoint of. The plaintiff, my client, or was it from the human resources’ perspective, the person who really was leading the charge here in trying to help Wells Fargo that they ignored. And so just those small changes in the opening made a difference.

The what kind of timeline did the jury wanna hear about? What did they need to see? From the get go in order to get the facts that we wanted them to get in the order in which we wanted to get it. And you might ask me this, but let me give you another example. This employee didn’t get where he was at Wells Fargo without being an exceptionally good performer.

He just was really at the top of his game. He made a lot of money for Wells Fargo, billions of dollars, and his [00:11:00] performance was never a question. In my mind, and it certainly wasn’t even a question in Wells Fargo’s mind, because remember, they claimed they fired him because they needed to do a layoff, a reduction in force.

So performance was not something that was top of mind as a fact necessary in this case. But without fail, no matter what I twisted or turn, or however I gave it to the focus group, the jurors wanted to know. Was he a good performer? And my lawyer brain said, the law applies even if you’re not a good performer, if you’re there, you get an a combination.

But it was important for this jury to know that he was a good performer and that it was proven in his performance evaluations. And so I only learned that through focus groups and in every focus group, no matter what I changed, it was part of the conversation was what kind of a performer was he? You only get that information.

That has to be something you give this jury jury early and let them [00:12:00] know and let them see it with their own eyes that the performance is where it needed to be in order for him to get an accommodation or for him to get to be worthy, if you will, of the credence of facts that we’re trying to share with them early on.

We don’t want them sitting there thinking. This guy must have been a poor performer. That’s why they fired him. It has nothing to do with his disability. And as I said, we would’ve never had really focused on getting that upfront as quickly and as early as possible. But for having heard it repeatedly from the focus groups, and I think the other kind of issue that you guys.

We’re worried about. But then also this was like a combo pack, which was, there were a lot of people who said, oh, he just wants to work from home because he is lazy. Because we’d all experienced like this work from home and having to go back. A lot of people didn’t want to, and there were some managers, so they were thinking, oh, this guy’s lazy wants to work at home and be lazy.

And so, you know, using the performance reviews was like, okay, we can. Counterbalance some of these other internal arguments people are having with themselves. Oh, he is lazy. [00:13:00] Oh, he, he, he maybe should have been fired anyhow. He wasn’t a good performer. Right. But yeah, there were all kinds of little negative attribute, negative defensive things going on in, in people’s minds.

And to that end, that’s a great comment because one of the things we tested every time was how receptive, if at all. Is the jury gonna be to request an accommodation that is work from home? Um, certainly there are legitimate disabilities such as my clients that working from home is a reasonable accommodation that would mitigate, in fact, their own HR person said it was reasonable after she reviewed all his medical records.

Concluded on Wells Fargo’s behalf that working from home was a reasonable ask and should have at least been tried. Okay, so take that aside. Some people, everybody knows somebody who just wants to stay home to take care of their pets, or they just don’t wanna put on makeup for the day, or they wanna be able to go on a walk at lunchtime around their neighborhood.

That’s what makes the world go round. [00:14:00] That’s what people want. But are those going to be. True accommodations for a true disability, there has to be a back and forth. That’s why it’s called the interactive process in the a DA, to go back and forth and see what works. But in this case, we needed to test were, was a jury going to be dismissive simply because the ask was work from home.

Was there gonna be some negative, uh, viewpoint that he just wants to ’cause he wants to, or is this a legitimate. Need in which that his disability is alleviated to make him equal. That’s why the a DA exists, it exists to make other, if we who have disabilities, equal to those who don’t. And so could this make him equal?

And so what we found is it depended. It depended a lot on the jury. It depended on their. Their viewpoints and their life experiences, if they had been taken advantage of somebody who just wanted to work from home. ’cause they just wanted it. Some [00:15:00] people didn’t think it was a reasonable ask. Mm-hmm. Other people thought that, again, this company, Wells Fargo, they really needed to consider the ask and they certainly should have followed their own HR person’s advice.

Yeah. How was it doing? Working from home? And of course it was like, we got this when he was knocking outta the park. And so I think. The other thing that you said that I wanna just repeat was she said she did 10 to 12 and she did six to seven on her, your opening statement and specifically to figure out what facts did they have to get first.

So a lot of what you did in your opening statement was, call it down, remove. We worked so hard to remove so many things, and that’s just from the opening. You put them somewhere else. They did come into trial, but they weren’t that front and center. What do they need to know immediately to be able to be on your side when you sat down after for opening?

Sure. Are you asking me what did they need to know, or, no, that’s kind of part of the equation for doing opening so many times was to continue, like you said, [00:16:00] tweak a little more, remove some things, put some things in a different way, and that was one of the things that we worked together on, was like, okay.

Let’s listen to what they said about this one, and then let’s try and put something else first or eliminate this thing and put this other thing first. And I think what one of the things that I remember coming out so clearly that was like, what can we do to solidify these HR notes? ’cause they were the, the golden ticket.

For the whole trial. ’cause wis, we realized like, oh, once they started to hear that, they were like, wait a second, we don’t really care. HR knows these. There are HR notes here. And so that was something that was like, okay, how many times can we remind them in the opening about these notes? Yep. Notes. Exactly.

And so to that end, somebody might hear this and think, wow, six to seven on just opening, were you just saying the same thing? No, we were saying different things, but in addition to that, it allowed us to test some of the evidence. When you’re testing your opening, you’re able to test some of those [00:17:00] critical pieces of evidence.

You know, you’re gonna get in like the notes, when do they need to hear it? What portions of those notes do they need to hear early? And what gives the biggest bang, like biggest punch. When they hear or saw they said no is a quote in her notes when she asked the company to just try the accommodation for six months when they see the, they said no.

That was very powerful. And it said, we need to get that upfront. And certainly it drove our order of proof in the case, which witnesses to put up first. Mm-hmm. And so we get a lot from the focus groups, um, at every phase. And sometimes you get multiple faceted pieces. Another example would be every focus group helped us to determine what kind of juror did we need on this case?

What did we want? So for purposes of jury selection, we were able to really look at. What were the world experiences of the people in the focus groups and who were [00:18:00] good jurors for this case compared with those jurors maybe we didn’t want. And so creating a little bit of a profile on what is a good juror for this case certainly helped during jury selection.

And was I doing that during opening focus groups that were tailored for opening? Sure. Because we were able to really see who understood. The case who got the points quickly, who understood the law to the extent that the court was gonna give him the law at the end, and who understood exactly what was being asked for here.

So while it was an opening statement, focus group, there are lots of pieces that come out of it, such as jury selection, testing your evidence, the order of witnesses you wanna put forth at trial. All of those baked into some of those. Now, I did do other focus groups that were designated, as I said, for a narrative early on before we even know what we are gonna put in our focus groups.

How did we need to communicate what the rules or the law is to this jury in order for them to understand it from our perspective early? And then [00:19:00] we did damage as focus groups as well, how, as you said, it’s a $22 million verdict. A large portion of that verdict is back pay and front pay because this person was a high earner, but it’s a lot of money.

So how is a jury going to react to an ask of that amount of money and when to ask for it? Do I ask for it during voir dire? Do I ask for, not ask for it, but do I allow the jury to know how much we’re gonna ask for during voir dire, or do I do it during opening so that they’re not sitting there wondering the entire time, how much money is she gonna ask us for in the end?

Or do I wait until the end? So all of that I was able to feel very comfortable doing at trial because I tested it in focus groups. Mm-hmm. And that was one a thing I was gonna say too, two things. First. In your case you had, how long was jury selection for you? Oh, so I’m in federal court and it is judge specific, but this particular judge allowed 10 minutes for the first eight [00:20:00] people in the box, and you have three peremptory strikes.

So how many ever people get struck once you go through your first 10 minutes per side would be the remaining minutes you had left. So let me give you what happened. After the first eight people were in the box and each side got 10 minutes, five people were excused from the jury. So five new people from the galley were pulled into the chairs and each side had five minutes.

So then there were, uh, two more strikes. So then two more people came in and each side had two minutes. So. That’s it. That’s it. So creating a juror profile, at least the people that you know like this, these are some characteristics. Again, when you’re doing virtual and you’re doing these over and over, and again, you’re, you’re getting a lot of like qualitative things, not just, oh, no one in their thirties is good.

Oh, no one who has a BA in arts and science thing. You had the experience wise, but then you also had, okay, what do I have to ask in 10 [00:21:00] minutes to get to know some of these things in here? ’cause. And you have to make your decision lightning fast, right? Absolute. So that gave you a lot of confidence to make that decision.

Lightning fast. Lightning fast. That is the best way. I think we described it NASCAR fast, right? We’re here to scarlet, and so it was so fast. So you have to really have a good idea and something you can’t learn without doing. Is to trust your instincts and trusting your instincts is really practicing jury selection over and over.

And the best place to do that is focus groups, right? So with every focus group that we did, I spent almost every, I spent some time doing a. Even longer voir dire section or jury selection than I got in real trial. But it allowed me to feel comfortable with the questions I wanted to ask to get real time responses from people that were focus group and be able to see what maybe people thinking about when I do ask those questions.

So [00:22:00] those instincts of trusting your gut, but also trusting your research that you have done through focus groups is really all you can do when you get 10 minutes. Yeah, and this is where you knew your judge. You knew you are gonna have this NASCAR fast, voir dire. So you knew how important that opening statement was to be able to nail it.

If you get somebody on there who’s not gonna fit that profile, okay, what do we need to have in this opening statement? ’cause you did it so many times to be able to retrofit some things like, okay. What you gotta do when you know how important that opening statement’s gonna be. As an employment lawyer, we don’t get to try a lot of cases.

99% of all employment cases settle and even though I’ve been practicing for 25 years. I have not tried a lot of cases, and so the other thing that focus groups give you amongst many is the confidence. So because I had tested it and because I knew how fast it had to be, I was really confident that the [00:23:00] questions I was going to ask would give me some information that I knew what to do with it in that quick period of time.

So again, that lack of confidence going in on what do I do with what they do say. You spinning your wheels at that point, you get nothing out of it. So if anything, for purposes of jury selection, not only do you get a bit of a profile, but you get the confidence to know that the questions you’re asking are going to serve the purpose you need them to serve in that time that you have, there’s no other way.

You’re just winging it otherwise. And if to wing it, you gotta have a lot of trials under your belt. And then that’s still research, so That’s right. That’s right. That’s exactly right. It’s still a form of research there. Yeah, exactly. Trial and error there. Well, to be truthful about this, 98% of things settle.

So trials are few and far between. They’re very hard to get. And I was talking with a lawyer who. He had several coming up and he’s been practicing for some time and he said, I love going to trial. That’s my favorite part. But trials now are so [00:24:00] different than they used to be. Used to file something and in six months you’re doing a trial on it and everybody’s getting up and going.

He is like, but now you get so bogged in the mere of the motions and once you finally get there, you’re exhausted. ’cause it’s just been this whole battle over these very small, minor things. It gets even more treasury. Once you get closer to trucks, they’re gonna throw more and more stuff. And that’s what you saw too, is they just kept throwing more and more stuff.

But for sure. I wanna stick a little sidebar here ’cause I want you to talk about, ’cause a lot of people worry, a lot of lawyers worry if I do focus groups. If there’s a chance, they’re gonna find out and there’s a chance they’re gonna try and get ’em. So that happened to you here, so, so walk us through where this was going on and tell, give us some background about using those clips and what happened.

Sure. So as mentioned, we started early. We started with the narrative, so it was before I even knew what discovery we’re gonna do. We can talk a little bit more about how we used it along the way, but we certainly used our focus group clips in mediation. [00:25:00] So the sanctity of mediation is supposed to be, it’s confidential.

The parties are supposed to come to the table in good faith, and they’re supposed to try to get the case settled. The mediators will tell you it’s the only day that you have complete control over the outcome of what happens in your case, mediation. So we had used some of our video clips. Some of the focus group members on what they really thought about what Wells Fargo did here about the A DA.

What is the expectation of the jury as to what the company should have done? What do they think of Wells Fargo generally and certainly. What is their viewpoint of what happened here? So we had some focus group members from across various. We didn’t just pick one that was really good for us. We showed Wells Fargo that we had conducted multiple focus groups, and we took clips from those focus groups and played them during the mediation in true good faith.

They pick the mediator, they pick the day, they pick the how. And I typically [00:26:00] don’t do a lot of presentations for mediation, but this one was so important that we wanted the Wells Fargo to see this is what the jury’s gonna think about these facts because nobody really wants to go to trial. Trial is something that’s forced upon a plaintiff.

’cause they have no other choice. The company didn’t settle and the case has, you get past summary judgment. In a plaintiff’s case, I mean, I’m sorry, in an employment case that’s hard enough to do and you actually get to trial. Settlement is a sure thing and so nobody comes into a case and says, I’m never gonna take a settlement.

We’re going to trial here. But I most jurors know that. I believe that they know that if it gets to them, it’s important and something along the way didn’t happen. And so anyhow, we showed the video clips. It was a silent presentation. I said nothing. I simply showed a PowerPoint presentation that had some video clips in it, and the next thing we got was a motion.

From Wells Fargo’s Lawyers, which is public, that says, give us all your video clips, give us [00:27:00] all of your videos from all of your focus groups. You have waived privilege because you shared these with us during mediation, and therefore we’re entitled to them all. In addition to that, and this is important, we had a protective order.

This particular judge has a standing protective order and anything marked confidential that you share with anybody, not just your expert, you have to have them sign an acknowledgement form that it’s confidential. So they, in addition to wanting the clips, wanted proof that all of these focus group people they saw had signed that form because we had shared with them some of the quotes from the human resources notes.

Now, we didn’t give them documents, we just shared the content of it. We had to brief it. This is again, part of the file, and fortunately we had a fantastic magistrate judge who immediately got it, and she said during an open hearing, well, wait a minute. Why do you get her focus groups? That’s attorney work product, but it’s also in a mediation.

Surely you’re doing your own [00:28:00] focus groups. Wells Fargo, you wanna turn over all yours to her too. I don’t know whether they did ’em or they’re not. There was a little bit of a deer in a headlight look from counsel’s table when she said that, but needless to say, the court did the right thing. And ordered that they were not gonna get these focus group clips, that they are attorney work product, and certainly anything provided in the sanctity of mediation is expected to be confidential.

And so, you’re right, lots of people are afraid of it. It can be really impactful to the opposite party if they’re open and they’re in good faith. Again, my opinion only is they really didn’t listen to what those focus group members had to say. They were more concerned about filing another motion and trying to make life very difficult in hopes that they’d get the whole of what we had recorded for each and every one, um, as opposed to.

Really using it as a tool or as a medium and to try to get the case resolved. And obviously it didn’t [00:29:00] resolve. No, it did not. And that, that motion is like one example. Tell me if this is wrong, but they tried to get you off the case. Three or four separate motions and one during trial. Right? Sure. So that’s very, this is all public.

So from the get go and what is the lesson? Lemme go back two lessons. One is, what’s the saying? And I’m gonna get it wrong. Somebody help me. It’s he who do protests too much. Yeah. So, or she who dosed does too much. Litigation is an all out fight. We get it. A lot of opposing lawyers. ’cause I was once a defense lawyer.

It’s, show me your cards, I’ll show you mine and let’s just see what happens. But some cases it’s an all out war. And so from the very beginning, Wells Fargo in their answer listed me as one of the lawyers who had helped this particular employee through the accommodation process. Let me back up. Mr. Billon, the plaintiff in this case, hired a lawyer.[00:30:00] 

To help him navigate Wells Fargo’s accommodation process, he did it because he didn’t wanna get it wrong, and he wanted to follow the letter of their handbook to the T and submit things the way that they required them to be done. He’s busy making sales, making money for Wells Fargo. He needed help. That lawyer wasn’t me.

It was somebody completely different. She was an a d, a advocate, but when I filed the lawsuit in their answer, they named me personally as the a DA advocate, even though their own records said otherwise. So I had to write ’em a letter and say, help me understand what due diligence you did before you told the court that I was the a DA advocate.

Clearly, you know better. And so they amended their answer, but it was an an immediate, Hey, we’re gonna try to conflict you. We’re gonna put you in here by name. We’re gonna make this difficult because all lawyers are supposed to do some amount of due diligence. Have actual evidence, even if it’s a [00:31:00] sworn declaration, before they file anything with the court that they know potentially is not true.

So anyway, they fixed that, and then later on, which is also public, one of the line managers above Mr. Billon had contacted my office for a consultation. Now I would never be telling anybody about that, but this particular person chose to disclose that to Wells Fargo’s lawyers. And we had noticed him up for a deposition and they immediately found a motion to disqualify me from taking his deposition because two years prior to this case, I had done a consultation with him.

So we had to brief that. And it went back and forth and finally the court again did the right thing and said no again. There’s no evidence here that has one, has anything to do with the other, and she can take his deposition. What does that do for the receiving lawyer? The [00:32:00] duties we have to our clients are the client that we do have, so it required a lot of disclosure.

It required a lot of, I got an ethics council opinion. I knew I was in the right. But because it’s Wells Fargo and the attack is on in such a way that had nothing to do with the case. It was a total deflection. I had to make sure we were on the right side of that and that I had everything in order in the event that the court somehow bought what they were saying.

And then, as you said, on the Friday before trial at 7:00 PM. The oldest trick in the book that might rattle a less senior, a less seasoned, we call it seasoned at my age lawyer, they file a motion claiming fraud on the court that I had committed fraud on the court and that all of my exhibits. That had been filed, my exhibit list that had been filed STR should be disallowed and should be struck.

And the basis for this is we had amended our exhibit lists between April 15th and July [00:33:00] 22nd. When trial actually was set to start, we’d amended our exhibit list. We’d added some exhibits to it, and they claim that because the deadline had passed, we were not allowed to amend our exhibit list. In addition to that.

We had some objections. They had some objections to our exhibits, and then we were working in Excel and they were working in Word, and we had to cut and paste and so on. Three innocuous exhibits. Some of their objections had been cut off on one of the versions we had filed. They claimed that was fraud on the court.

What was so troubling about it too is not a call, not an email, not anything. There was no communication with me whatsoever to claim any kind of. What’s the word? Any kind of prejudice confer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they just followed at seven o’clock before we’re set to go to trial Monday. Now I have to say, and this is part of the transcript, so when we get the final transcript, the court was having nothing to do with that.

And back in January when we had this big [00:34:00] hearing with the magistrate on the focus group, the court said to both parties, said, I’ve never seen a case. So many motions have been filed. Now I hadn’t filed any, so it was, she was talking to us like children in the sense of making sure we all were covered by it.

But it was directed at Wells Fargo’s lawyers for filing so many motions. And I reminded the court of that in my response to the 7:00 PM Monday, uh, 7:00 PM Friday. And so we go in what Judge Whitney said. Look, so what people amend their exhibit lists up until trial and sometimes even during trial. And cautioned that they had been warned about filing frivolous sanctions, motions, and.

I would not have liked that type of admonishment from the court if I had done what they did, but I don’t know how Wells Fargo’s lawyers received it. All I know is I have been in front of this judge many times, and to hear him be that upset to really say, I’m gonna turn the gun back on you, which was his quote, it was serious.

And so [00:35:00] again. The tactics, the antics, the deflection during this litigation to be anything but about what actually happened here is what we had to go through in order to get to the jury. Mm-hmm. I hope that you are enjoying the interview so far with Michelle Gesner. I’m stepping in as this is where we’re gonna end this episode, and you’ll have to wait for part two for the remaining part of that.

Interview, but I do wanna just talk really quickly about a few things we’ve heard so far, gaining confidence from focus groups, learning how focus groups can help you when your voir dire is 20 minutes or less. And also what happens if opposing counsel tries to get access to your focus group footage. All right.

Thank you so much for tuning in. Michelle Gassner’s Contact information will be in the show notes along with the link to join the email list trial lawyer prep newsletter. And until next time, thank you so much.[00:36:00] 

This episode join Elizabeth Larrick as she explores the decision-making process of whether to settle a case or proceed to a jury trial. This episode provides trial lawyers with actionable insights into evaluating jury trials by examining recent verdicts and settlements and leveraging the experience of attorneys familiar with key players in the case. Elizabeth shares how focus groups composed of non-lawyers can offer valuable perspectives, helping to understand jurors’ mindsets.

Look into trial preparation and risk assessment, focusing on the importance of evaluating evidence from a juror’s viewpoint. Elizabeth discusses the strategic use of focus groups in refining opening statements and provides a comprehensive view of weighing the risks and rewards of settling versus going to trial. 

In this episode, you will hear:

• Decision-making between settling a case and going to a jury trial
• Importance of researching recent verdicts, settlements, and consulting experienced attorneys.
• Utilizing focus groups to understand jurors’ perspectives and attitudes.
• Trial preparation, risk assessment, and evaluating evidence from a juror’s viewpoint.
• Assessing trial costs, time commitments, and potential outcomes to guide clients effectively.

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Supporting Resources:

Related episodes on trial preparation: Ep 122

Episode Credits

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Episode Transcript:

Hello and welcome back to the podcast. I’m your host, Elizabeth Ric, and I’m glad that you’re joining me Today. We are back on our regular programming and tackling a pretty common situation, and that is having to [00:01:00] evaluate whether to settle or go to jury trial and using focus groups to help you, or at a minimum, right, getting into the point of view of the juror.

So let’s dive in a little bit into what kind of situation are we talking about to get specific, because this is a situation where you’ve got a case that has a decent, or what you might call an okay offer. You are coming up to trial. This is gonna be the setting where it actually goes. If you practice, even in many places, there are several settings before you actually have the official, okay, this is gonna be it.

So you’re coming up on this official, it’s gonna be it. Maybe you’re 60 days down the road, maybe you’re 90 days down the road. You’ve done all the mediations and you know you’ve got this okay offer. You’re getting a little bit of pressure from your opposing counsel. Your client’s really looking to you for a lot of guidance here because they’re not really sure, [00:02:00] but they’re not totally opposed to going to trial, right?

So you are like in this total middle position here, and you need to help your client make this decision, okay? But what we are not talking about. Is the case where you have no offer, right? So we’re not making a decision. We’re going, there’s not an offer here. Or the offer is just so low, it makes you laugh, right?

Like, okay, like that’s laughable. Like, we’re going to trial. That’s not what we’re really talking about here. Really sitting down to help make that decision about whether to settle or go to jury trial when you’ve kinda really got this middle position going on. And number one thing I encourage people to do when you’re in this situation is number one, do what we love to do most as lawyers, which is research.

Go and look at a verdict and settlement database and go look and see what’s happened right in the past year or two years. I’m always very cautious of people going like, behind the pandemic. Don’t do that. [00:03:00] Try to get things that are recent. And then of course, in your jurisdiction, right? So that’s gonna gather, right?

What’s kind of been going on in your jurisdiction or in the general area for your specific type of case, and what are the ranges of verdicts and settlements that you can find? The next piece of research I suggest that people do is go find lawyers who have been in trial with the same judge or the same defense counsel.

Now, we talked a little bit about this. Like how do we really get ready for trial prep in an episode? And I will put that link in the show notes where we talk about, okay, jury instructions are an okay place to start, but let’s really look at what are the judges’ rules. So really get set about what is actually gonna happen.

And, and in that particular episode, we talked about kind of. Like those rules can kind of sneak up on you, and that judge persona can really change the dynamic of your trial preparation and what you [00:04:00] can actually do in the courtroom. So that’s really important to know. If you’re gonna evaluate whether to settle or go to jury trial, what is your judge persona?

And then also what is your. Defense counsel, right? Like, do they let things go? Do they jump up and down and object every, you know, five minutes? And so that’s also really helpful just to get, again, we want to get things into your brain because what’s gonna happen is we’re gonna eventually turn to evaluating, but we need to put that information into our supercomputers.

And then, you know, always be a little leery of folks who haven’t been to trial in a couple years, like 10 years or more, right? We really need to have fresh information this day and age, especially knowing how quickly life changes and how quickly information is, is flooded into jurors. Lay people, right.

And things change so quickly compared comparative, especially before the pandemic. Okay. So keeping that in mind when we’re going and doing our research, and of course that’s [00:05:00] our, our, our other piece of research is asking, right? Non-lawyers going to our focus groups and asking, what do you think? Right?

Here’s the facts. And what do you think? Because in this particular space, we are getting outside of our lawyer bubble. Which is where we need to be because looking at evaluating jury trial, we want to make sure we’re looking and talking to juror Ro. So this is where we’re getting out of our bubble. And again, we’re talking about something short and sweet and just looking at what do they think about the facts?

What are their attitudes? About the situation. What are their assumptions they’re making about what’s happening to the people you know in the story that they hear? What are the main facts that they like? What are the main facts they don’t like? And I think one of the most important pieces we gather from focus groups, which is confusion.

Where is there confusion? And where are we maybe putting too [00:06:00] much information in and we need to pull it back? Or the opposite. We don’t have enough. We’re making this assumption. They understand a situation where we need to go in and explain it. And again, all this virtual focus groups are a place where we can go do this short and sweet and get that really that blink reaction.

Is that what you want? Because. Thinking about jurors who’re gonna get that blink reaction to your information, to that case statement that’s read by the judge. Where do they immediately go? Right. Are they immediately put off? You want to know that because that’s gonna significantly help. You know, what is it the burden that I had to get over?

Right? It. It’s not just a preponderance of the evidence, by the way, y’all we’re talking about what is already in the juror’s mind that I have to get them to go around or change. And there are a lot of times you cannot. Right. Like you can’t, right? There’s not gonna be anything, right? So you wanna know that before you take down that path and, you know, go to jury trial.

[00:07:00] So you’ve got this extra research right in your brain. And what I always suggest people do is number two is line it out, right? This specifically this, you know, line it out and make a list of good facts. Make a list of bad facts. Make a list of neutral facts, right? Mark Lanier here. Okay. So that’s what he does.

He sits down and he literally lines it up and, and literally writes it on a piece of paper. If you wanna use computer, type it out to compare. Okay? I also like to have kind of a list of what I call iffy evidence, and this is like if it comes in and it may not, right? So it’s very iffy. You’re not sure whether that piece of evidence is going to come in or not, and.

Will it be snuck in, right? If it’s negative, will it, will the, will the defense somehow sneak it in? And you really wanna make sure you, when you have a piece of iffy evidence that you write, you know, what’s your best case scenario and your worst case scenario, right? If the fact [00:08:00] comes in, what’s worst case scenario?

Is it that you lose or is it that you got some damage control? What’s best case scenario, it doesn’t come in or maybe it’s something you really wanna come in. Right. And how does that really significantly help you in your case with the juror? So having that kind of lining it out, and I really even say go as far as writing your order of proof, right?

Just make a list again, of witnesses and what will they cover. Right. And I always like to do this because it shows me where are the holes I may have, right? So thinking through where are my liability witnesses, where are my damages witnesses, do I have enough and what are they gonna cover specifically?

And does somebody need to do extra lifting for me, right? Because maybe. You can’t add any more witnesses. And that’s the other thing too, is like if we put our experts on there, right, what kinda lifting are they gonna do for us? When it comes down to filling in that? Jury [00:09:00] instruction, are we covering all of our bases?

You just wanna make sure that you’ve got that and don’t have any holes in there. And again, making sure, like with my list of bad facts, can I move any of those into the neutral or the good bucket? Now let me give you an example. So let’s say you have a case situation where you’ve got your safety rules.

Maybe you like to use your safety rules, but you got rule breakers on both sides of the aisle. You got a rule breaker on your client is a rule breaker and your defendant is also a rule breaker. Now you kinda got, okay, how do I switch that into a good fact? And even, can I or do I just, how do I neutralize that?

Because when we then have, both sides are rule breaking, it’s almost like they start to compare it and it’s not an easy slam dunk, right? There’s gonna be something that comes on your client and it’s like, hmm, okay, but how can I. Really either make this, these are two totally different things, or just neutralize it.

[00:10:00] And that’s one of those things you gotta figure out, okay, what kinda ding are we gonna take on that and how can we maybe possibly fix it? Now what’s important here is as well as go back and kinda look at, okay. Deposition wise, how do we fare in some of our stuff? Do we have any holes based on our testimony?

And again, always looking at, at this point too, looking at our jury instructions. Some of the claims that we have. Are we making everything? Do we have enough to get all the blanks filled in? Or whatever it may, maybe it’s clear and convincing that you need to have, but, and you, maybe you need to look at the law on that too, to make sure you’re actually going to meet.

What is happening, right. And you’re not just making a leap because many a times we will believe, oh, I got that deposition, I got that transcript. It’s super clear. What the defendant said is definitely going to be, you know, clear and convincing evidence that they disregarded right what was, and it’s like, eh, [00:11:00] it’s really not.

It’s pretty tenuous. Most judges are not gonna give that to you. And again, thinking through, you’ve already learned about your judge, so you can actually at this point, look at and evaluate, is this gonna come in or not? Am I gonna actually get this? Jury instruction, or should I just go ahead and like, no, in my mind, I’m gonna let that go.

And the other piece here that we do when we think about lining it up and you know, starting to evaluate is what are the costs? Like what time cost is gonna be to me in my office expert? Literally the expenses, right? What are expenses gonna be for a trial like this, depending on how long it is? And of course, at this point, now that you’ve really dived.

Into the evidence. Maybe you even outlined your opening statement, which I think is extremely helpful at this stage. So you’ve got your research in your mind, you’ve gotten the evidence, you’re lining things out. You’ve got a good grasp on what’s going on. Now is also a great time to do a second focus group because now.[00:12:00] 

You’ve got that first one layered in, and you’ve got a really good grasp on how you’re gonna lay this out. With advocacy, with the persuasion, with the sequencing the way you want it. Now go to that second focus group with that opening statement and see what they think. Right? Are you getting there? And again, I always caution people, you know, when we have iffy evidence, we don’t take that to a focus group because we don’t want.

We wanna make sure we’re testing worst case scenario. We don’t wanna test best case scenario. We’re not doing focus groups to confirm what you already know. I mean, we’re testing our worst case scenario here, but again, thinking through like just be safe. Test what you know is gonna come in. But in this second focus group, again, we’re still talking about maybe even an hour, just doing that opening statement to see are they shuck and jivan with what you’re laying down, or are they not?

It is not, it’s just not, not the whole thing. So step one, research. Step two, line it out, evaluate, think [00:13:00] about it. Okay, and finally, step three, which is the point of view of the juror, which is stepping into their shoes, right? Putting on your juror hat and thinking, okay, if I’m sitting here and I’m hearing these facts for the first time.

Do I care? And don’t try to play the sympathy card here because it may be sad, but that does not make them move the needle when it comes to an amount of money. Sad doesn’t do it. Okay. Sympathy does not do it. And so be very careful about putting your finger on that sympathy button and thinking that that is actually going to persuade jurors it does not.

They we see sad. Terrible things happen all the time as a juror in a juror’s life on tv. So we don’t have a lot of sympathy. Okay? Bad things happen all the time. So if you’re hearing this for the first time as a juror, do I care about what happened here? Because most of the time jurors are sitting there thinking, how do I get out [00:14:00] of this?

I would much rather even be at work than doing this. Okay, so why would they care about it? And. If they do, are they going to give the amount of money you are going to ask for? This is kind of the hardest question. When I go and I help people get ready for trial, what is the number? And it’s always a challenge to think about what number.

Because you’ve got, you’ve been talking settlement, right? But now we’re talking about jury trial, and that’s a really important piece for you to figure out and go through this evaluation of, okay, if I’m a juror sitting here, and if it’s best case scenario, right? If it’s worst case scenario, what is that number that they may put in the blank?

And then is it worth rolling the dice? Because we think about it, and again, we get stuck in our lawyer bubble. And throw around some really large numbers and sometimes it’s just not gonna get there. And the reason why I stress thinking about it in the sense of you’re sitting in [00:15:00] this courtroom, you don’t really wanna be there, you’re hearing the facts.

You’re sitting with a bunch of strangers. What’s going through your mind and do you care? And this is not about asking your partner or your spouse or your friend or the knitting circle down at the church, right? It’s about thinking about really getting into that point of view of a juror not biased opinion of people that know it’s okay.

And being really honest about what that juror may be thinking about while they’re sitting there. Okay. And what distractions may be going on their heads too. Okay. ’cause we gotta fight all those things while we’re in jury trial. So let’s go back. And let’s walk back through this very quickly. You’ve gotten an okay, maybe a decent offer, but it’s not your number, the client’s on the fence about it, but they would go to trial if you asked ’em to, right?

You’ve got some decent facts, but you’re not really sure. What would be the rocket fuel? What would really drive a verdict here, you’re not really [00:16:00] sure. And you need to help that client decide. So step one, put on your research hat, right? Go out there, look at our verdict and settlement databases. Talk to lawyers who’ve been.

With this judge in trial recently and lawyers who have been against this defense counsel in trial recently, get that research and then go and do a virtual focus groups, spend an hour with some folks filling out the facts. Filling out what do they think? Well, they care about what assumptions do they make.

Number two then is with that move into lining up. What you got. Write out that order of proof. What are these witnesses gonna provide? Look at your evidence. Make your good, your bad, and your neutral list of facts. What can you move around, right? And again, what’s our iffy evidence? Maybe it’s coming in, maybe it’s not, but you really wanna look at.

Best case scenario, what my evidence looks like and a worst case scenario. What my evidence looks like and what are literally the expenses that I would have, the expense of [00:17:00] time and money to go to trial. Very important. You gotta be able to predict that and let your client know that they’re not surprised.

Another great place to run a virtual focus group where you are putting in your opening statement, you’re ordering things, you’re sequencing it, you’re putting in your best foot forward here. Not reaching for that iffy evidence in there, but putting in that best case. Scenario as far as sequencing and persuasion.

And then our last step, which would be sitting and thinking about what the point of view of a juror would be sitting in that courtroom, hearing your voice, talk about it. And the opening statement, and now you’ve gone through those three steps and they are time consuming, I will tell you. But you’re making a big decision here, right?

You’re going, this is going to trial, or you’re gonna settle the case. You need to have a good set of research before you can make that decision, because you’ve gotta get into the mind of the juror. You have to, because [00:18:00] that’s the one that actually makes the decision. Once you walk in that courtroom, you turn it over to them.

And do you have the tools, you have the evidence to help them reach the decision that you would like them to? And you know, once you have all this information, you can realistically evaluate what is the risk? Is this a case that they’re not gonna care about? Is this a case that they’re maybe gonna give a hundred grand?

Maybe they’re gonna give 30 grand. And we got an offer that’s better than that. But you can now properly advise the client and help them make the decision, but also give them the tools too. What are the expenses? What’s the time? What have other cases done? Which is what people always ask. So I hope that you found this episode helpful if you were on your journey of whether to settle or go to a jury trial.

And of course, right now. I am offering the [00:19:00] on demand. Set up your own DIY Virtual Focus group course. The link for that will be in the show notes, so please don’t try to drive and write this down, which is elizabeth larrick.com/online focus groups. Okay. Also, don’t forget to check the show notes for the other episode that we have about doing research for trial.

Okay. I hope you found this episode helpful, and until next time, thank you.

Join Elizabeth Larrick as she explores the transformative power of virtual focus groups for trial lawyers. In this episode, Elizabeth discusses her course, “DIY Virtual Focus Groups for Beginners,” designed to equip trial lawyers with the skills to run their own focus groups. Elizabeth shares her experience of how these methods have enhanced her practice by providing crucial jury insights and improving case decisions. The course offers practical tools, including recorded Zoom sessions, a detailed workbook, and a supportive community, addressing common challenges like recruitment, presentation, and moderation.

Elizabeth emphasizes the importance of integrating feedback into legal case preparations, aiming for clarity and simplicity in jury communication. Discover how running your own focus groups can refine your presentation strategies, connect more effectively with juries and clients, and enhance your overall courtroom success. 

In this episode, you will hear:

• Introduction to DIY Virtual Focus Groups for trial lawyers
• Strategies for recruitment, presentation, and moderation in focus groups
• Importance of integrating feedback for effective jury communication
• Benefits of running personal focus groups for case preparation

Follow and Review:

We’d love for you to follow us if you haven’t yet. Click that purple ‘+’ in the top right corner of your Apple Podcasts app. We’d love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast.

Supporting Resources:

To learn more about the on-demand course Do-It-Yourself Virtual Focus Groups go to https://elizabethlarrick.com/on-demand-course-focus-groups/

To hear other episodes about running your own virtual focus groups check out:

DIY Focus Groups with Clint Shumacher [Ep 83]

Setting Up Your Focus Group System [Ep 81]

Focus Group Recruiting [Ep 80]

DIY Virtual Jury Research Part 1 [Ep 19]

DIY Virtual Jury Research Part 2 [Ep 20]

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

Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I’m your host, Elizabeth Larrick, and I’m glad you’re here today. This episode is going to be a bit different from my normal style. I am going to be sharing information about my on demand course, DIY virtual focus groups for beginners. I’ve talked quite a bit about virtual focus groups on this podcast.

That’s not normal. Even if you’re just now joining me, you may have probably heard some other episodes That were in the feed or that you saw before episode 19, episode 20, episode 80, and a great interview with Clint Schumacher on DIY Focus Groups. All those links will actually be in the show notes if you want to go back and take a look at those.

What I found though is that it was a little bit of a piecemeal information and I get a lot of questions in my email inbox about running virtual focus groups and several pitfalls that people may run into. And so I decided that I could create a course to help folks that are out there either getting started, they’re interested in it, or maybe they’re running them at their own office right now and they’re just getting stuck.

But before I did that, I went out and I looked at what resources right now are available for lawyers, specifically, that gives them a full picture on creating virtual focus groups, not just the recruiting piece, but also the presentation piece and the moderating, which can be really challenging for us because sometimes it turns into cross exam.

And knowing that the importance of running your own virtual focus groups, having that information To make decisions in your case is really key. That’s how I was able to run my law firm. I learned how to do them and put that into practice very quickly to help me make decisions because I didn’t have a lot of resources.

So I wanted to make sure that I could maximize my cases that I had with the basically the resources I had to put into them. And I just really didn’t want to pick the wrong case to go to trial on and possibly lose or make the wrong decision about investing in a case that really wasn’t going to get very far with the jury.

And I believe every lawyer should have access to jury research, no matter where you are, because it really helps overall with running your law firm, making good decisions and having a lot of confidence and assurance in what you’re doing when sometimes it feels like you’re just operating in a vacuum.

There are not very many other resources that we can Really used to get feedback about what other people jurors actually people were making decisions about the cases think right. We can talk to their lawyers. That’s nice. That experience is good. But if you ever been a trial, you know, it’s never going to go exactly as somebody else’s trial has gone.

And so you just want to make sure that you’re testing that. So. I looked at my process and again, I looked back at what people were asking me. I ran several webinars back as well in March and February to help kind of give some information to see where things were needing, where people were lacking. And I even asked again, did other polls to make, ask lawyers.

And what I found was, Or what I’ve created was a live three sessions, zoom sessions where everybody could come in and ask questions and go through the material together. There’s so much material that I created a workbook to go along with everything. And of course you record everything. Which is now what this episode is about the on demand version of that course.

It’s still all the great information about the very actionable steps that you can take along with options. I know that my way is not the highway. There are lots of ways that folks run focus groups. And so I tried to provide those options as well for you along with, you know, really an overview with timelines that you can look at and thinking through the ability.

to delegate to staff members. And so I really encourage lawyers and their staff to join our meetings that we had back in May. Again, that’s exactly what this episode is about. That on demand course that is now available until December 1st. and access will be available all the way through the end of 2024.

And what I’ve also done is because it’s so vital for us to be able to ask questions and get information is I’ve also scheduled an Ask Me Anything on December 2nd so that we can get together and you can pick my brain and I can ask you questions as well about how things are going. And also the platform that is hosting the course allows for a lot of community interaction, a lot of posting.

And that I feel like is always really helpful when you’re doing something new and you have questions and lawyers are really good about questions. You immediately can go there, post a question and get an answer. Okay. So that’s really, I think a helpful part of it as well. And what can you really gain from taking this course?

Well, number one, DIY do it yourself, virtual focus groups, right? Get in yourself, literally those step by step actions to get over that starting place where you’re thinking, how do I get started? And naturally that’s going to save costs and that’s going to make it really convenient for you and. Your office to get answers on questions.

But really, what is gained is confidence and certainty in the evidence that you have and assurance that you have been able to flip those negative facts into either positive positive or even just neutralize them. Really be able to issue spot things that you can’t see as a lawyer, right? We’ve always got some blind spots, especially when we are really invested in a case.

It’s hard to see the other point of view and that’s where focus groups are so awesome at seeing things that we can’t. themes, being able to really look at those facts and targeting concerned areas with these one hour, two hour, even three hour virtual focus groups and getting the clarity that you want, right, to make decisions about cases.

And here recently, right, I had a lawyer who perfectly summarized it. He said, I’m so relieved because. You give this presentation and hearing their feedback that we don’t have to go into a trial and really educate people about something so boring as our case. And it’s like, yes, it is so much simpler than what we make it to be, right?

We tend to complicate things because we have so much information and facts. And really that’s where a focus group, even a short focus group can help you see the simplicity of the case without any complication. And of folks that have taken this course, right? I mean, you know, one of the reviews that I’ve gotten is that, you know, it’s the course has information about gathering people and have forms for different types of focus groups that are available and even interpreting the information, which is kind of critical, right?

We want to make sure that we interpret things correctly. So. All of that is packaged right into three on demand videos and three workbooks that go with that. And the workbooks just kind of accentuate, meaning they’re going to give you more information than what is in the video, but you can go in there and play the videos that you need.

Again, having you and staff be able to have access to those so everybody’s on the same page. And then again, that December 2nd Ask Me Anything, so everybody can come in and get their questions answered. It was definitely one of the highlights of the live version that we had in May, because there is just so much information in there, and sometimes, you know, it’s hard to necessarily connect to it.

everything. Plus, there’s always generally a nuanced question that folks have about maybe their particular practice area or how do you focus group this topic or this problem, right? So that’s always a great question to ask as well. So if you’re interested in learning more about the on demand course, head over to ElizabethLarrick.

com slash on demand course Focus groups, long link. I understand it’ll be in the show notes. So if you’re driving or walking, just know, check those show notes later to find that link. And plus, if you are just not sure if making, doing your own virtual system for jury research is what you’d like to do, then go back to those episodes I mentioned before, 19, 20, 80.

Again, the links will be in the show notes to see, you know, is this something that I want to do? And, um, You know, I encourage folks that it is much simpler than you think to get it started. And it’s, of course, it feels simple to me because I’ve been doing it for years, but I want every lawyer who is practicing in this space, plan of personal injury, employment law, business litigation, to have a tool to help them make decisions to, and also educate their client.

You know, that’s one of those things that sometimes we have clients that are really fixated on Certain facts and certain pieces of their damages, which maybe just don’t hit the jury the same way, right? And it’s hard for them to understand that until they actually see it. And that’s just one of the benefits that you have is.

You can run one of these focus groups right when you need it with the perfect amount of time that you need with an efficient cost and get that answer and then be able to move forward in the case. So many times what I see people do is really hesitate. when it comes to getting information to move a case forward.

And the hesitation could be there’s other cases going on or well that mediation got moved so I’ll just, I’ll just wait to do that later. That’s not a pressing thing that I need information on. I’ll just move it down. Right? You reprioritizing things based on trial dates and expert depositions, and mediations.

Here’s where that becomes a huge problem. That’s really underestimating the amount of amazing information and perspective you will get from a virtual focus group. And you will want to marinate on that information because initial blush may be You want to, you know, run to the bathroom, Ralph, because it’s all terrible information.

But once you really need to digest it to be able to see, Oh, okay, wait a second. Let me get a little bit deeper here on what they’re saying and really try to integrate this into the case earlier than waiting. LLC. Many a times what happens is at first blush, it sounds like they really they’re putting your case in the garbage pan, right?

Like they don’t like it. It sounds like they’re creating more problems for you than not. But most of the time, if you sit with it, go back over it. And this is where that interpretation comes from. You realize I can answer all of these questions, but wow, I need to make that really clear. up front and how do I do that now with, with what I have left, right?

Like maybe it’s the mediation presentation. Maybe it’s these expert depositions that I need to get those questions in up front and very clear so that it’s the jury has those answers. They’re not sitting there wondering about these things. And again, the longer we can marinate on this feedback, the more we can integrate it into our cases and make them better.

Even if at the end of the day, it’s going to be a settlement. That’s okay. Because most of the decision makers on our cases fit more into the Drupal than they do, than they do on our side of things, right? They’ve got very few of things, but having a little bit of clarity and simplicity fits everybody because our brains love that that is persuasive.

And that’s a huge piece of what you can get from running your own purchase groups. Okay. Well, that’s it. I hope that this episode, although different than the normal ones, was helpful and maybe if you’re not ready yet, that’s okay. This is still a good place to maybe peruse the page. Look at the information and see like, okay, listen to the other episodes.

Maybe this is, maybe this isn’t, but just know that that is available for you until December 1st. All right. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

In this episode, Elizabeth explores innovative and cost-effective strategies for trial preparation that go beyond traditional mock juries. Designed with solo practitioners and small law firms in mind, this episode examines techniques like focus groups that can provide valuable insights without the high costs. Learn how attorneys like Ryan Squires and Peter Levine successfully used virtual focus groups to refine their trial strategies, leading to significant verdicts and settlements. Gain actionable tips to enhance your courtroom skills and connect more effectively with juries. 

In this episode, you will hear:

• Exploring cost-effective alternatives to mock juries for trial preparation
• Benefits and insights of using focus groups, both in-person and virtual
• Overcoming traditional trial prep challenges for solo practitioners and small firms
• Practical tips for conducting short, targeted focus groups

Follow and Review:

We’d love for you to follow us if you haven’t yet. Click that purple ‘+’ in the top right corner of your Apple Podcasts app. We’d love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast.

Supporting Resources:

Want to get in-depth insight straight to your inbox? Join the Trial Lawyer Prep Newsletter at www.larricklawfirm.com/connect to get a specially crafted email once a month from Elizabeth that gives lawyers extra resources, tips and information on preparing the best case.

Here are the episodes mentioned by Elizabeth:

Ep 35 Ryan Squires and his Record Setting $40 million verdict

Ep 19 DIY Virtual Jury Research Part 1

Ep 20 DIY Virtual Jury Research Part 2

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

Hello and welcome back to the podcast. I’m your host, Elizabeth Larrick, and I’m glad you’re here and joining me today.

This episode, we are going to talk about a common misconception That I hear when I talk with lawyers and we’re thinking about trial prep and what to do and where to go to learn about jurors attitudes, case themes, you know, who are the good jurors demographically, who are the not good jurors demographically.

And what I always get back is that it’s a mock jury. But this is really kind of the only way that you’re going to be able to learn what you need to learn. To do your trial prep correctly and listen that is not the only way and I want to put together this episode because I know if That’s very much a traditional thought, right?

We’ve learned it from somebody else. It’s been passed down, right? And mock juries are really cool. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve done them. They’re great. But if that’s the only way we think about trial prep, that really starts to exclude a lot of people because they’re so expensive and time consuming. And I can tell you like right here as a solo running my own law firm, thinking of doing a mock jury on my own, like there’s no way I couldn’t afford to do that on any of my cases.

And lo and behold, right, working with other folks and starting to do focus groups on my own, you know, just started to do it. This is what I had available to me. So that’s what I did. Now, when I doing my consulting work and talking with lawyers now for several years, I still keep hearing kind of this, not that it’s a roadblock, but that it is the only way.

Right. Oh, we’re going to do a trial. Oh, we’re doing a mock jury. And so that’s really what this episode is about is, hey, we’ve got alternatives here and why would we need alternatives? Well, again, like I said, number one, thinking about mock jury as the only way to do your trial prep really knocks a lot of people out just based on time consumption.

And money, right? The resource. And that’s because, I mean, traditionally a mock jury is where you’re going to run the full case. So that’s one, a lot of time consumption in putting tech together. So a lot of people, they’re going to have. you know, openings, they’re going to have video evidence, sometimes even live people come and play or read the depositions and you’re gonna have closings, you know, jury instructions.

So it really is the full case and then you watch the deliberations. And so there’s a big resource in, you know, location, videographer, your staff, right. And just helping put these things together. Plus being there, not to mention your, your taxing in the sense time tax in that it’s, you know, You’ve got to put together all these things, all the openings, think about it, get, get extra lawyers to come play all these things.

And so ultimately, it is very clunky when it comes to putting it together and it’s like a whole project management. And it’s really hard to get some qualitative information on specific issues that may be concerning you. Because what you end up getting with a mock jury is you watch deliberations and you get that kind of verdict, right?

And there may be like a debrief and sometimes there is where basically after they finish deliberating, which you’re watching and then you have somebody go in and start, hey, let me ask some questions and just try to get information out of them. They really can’t give you a lot of clear information because they’ve been there all day.

They’ve consumed so much new information. They really probably can’t give you specifics. more than they’ve already talked about in deliberation. So you, you kind of lose out on some of those real sticking points that maybe you wanted to know about or pieces of evidence or, or witnesses, right? So you’re really getting very much a high level, what I call yes, no, right.

You’re getting that verdict where, how they came up with that. Yes, you watch deliberations, but I’m sure if you’ve done one of these, you’re You have the same concern I have, which is like one person is going to nominate right or which what I’ve also seen is where instead of actually like. thinking through and putting together something thoughtful.

They just vote and they just divide and do math and they just move on, right? They’re done. So it’s very hard sometimes to figure out what people are really thinking about the issues because they just kind of do an aggregation of their thoughts instead of actually like kind of debating it like you would think the deliberations go.

So. The other thing is too, once you finish these things, usually you’re spent, right? You’re, you’re exhausted. You’ve got to really move on to doing trial things, motions and liminees and answer all those emails and the judge and you really only have time to do one of these. So you don’t even have comparison information after you get this.

Generally you get, you know, kind of a really large report. You’re not gonna be wrong, like there are definitely, you know, votes along the way and other things to kind of look and test along the way, but again, without having a little bit of a, like a stop in discussion, people just lose it, right? They can’t hold all that information in their brain, then regurgitate it later on in deliberations or rather in the discussion debrief.

So, you know, mock jury, it’s great, but it can be really clunky and, and very traditional. So let’s talk about two alternatives. And number one is the short in person focus group. And when I say short, we’re talking two hours, three hours, maybe four hours max. And why I say that is because thinking through four hours, you’re going to have a couple of breaks, but you’re going to try to get people in and out of there without having to do a meal.

And again, that’s just trying to think through expenses. We’re going to have to get a location. We’re going to have to get a videographer. We’re still going to have this a little bit of an expense to get a neutral location and a place with enough bathrooms. All those things, you know, to make sure participants want to show up and they’re not coming to your office and already having a biased thought about, Hmm, I’m in a lawyer’s office.

I wonder if this is their case, right? Of course, they’re going to assume it’s your case. So the other reason why thinking through these short, like, two hour, three hour in person is in person is still going to allow you the opportunity to practice your presentation style, getting on your feet, practicing that tone, that cadence, It’s the movement, right?

How it works with your PowerPoint. A lot of people really love that piece of a mock jury. It gets them. They put the suit on, you get on your feet and you’re looking people in the eye and you’re delivering the information. Super important, right? That really helps you with practice. That’s why I say one alternative is these short in person focus groups.

And with the shorter version, though, you can really Specifically do pieces of the trial, right? So you can really practice jury selection and you can practice an opening statement. Maybe you skip the jury selection and just do an opening statement and some witness videos. But you’re allowing them to really absorb one piece, get the feedback on that piece, and really jump in and understand what’s behind, right, their reactions or their attitudes and following up to get that information right there, what’s on the top of their brain.

And then moving to the next piece, right? So think about a two hour, you want to do what deer for an hour and you, then you want to run an opening statement. Great. Like you’re going to be able to do that in a way where you’re going to be able to then go back. Well, and you’re getting on your feet, you’re practicing, you’re listening, you’re doing all the good things that what do your requires of us.

And then you’re going to do your opening statement and you’re going to have somebody else get up and do that discussion piece, but you’re going to get the feedback. That you need to hear on those specific issues without crowding more information into their brains. On top of that, and again, thinking if you added an hour, do three hours, right?

So adding in a defense opening here. So there’s a lot of flexibility when we look at just focusing on specific pieces of trial to get you ready and to get that immediate feedback. What also allows you to do is to repeat it, right? Maybe you want to redo your opening or you want to change some things based on what you heard and test it again.

Well, you have the ability, cause these again are shorter. They’re going to be a little more cost effective, but they’re still going to give you that in person presentation style that you want to practice. And then you’re again, going to have this extra data to be able to build more of a data set versus just doing one mock jury.

And again, like I said, it’s much less burdensome on the planning, the putting it together, the time and the money resources. Plus, like I said, you’re getting more qualitative information about specifics that you may have concerns about versus overcrowding them with lots of information and just getting that high level, yes or no, what percentage of responsibility.

Now, you’re still going to get answers to those questions. Like even if you didn’t want them to give it to you, that’s generally what they’re going to do anyhow. So you’re going to get that information, But you’re going to get what’s behind it in a much different format versus watching them deliberate, right?

You’re going to have that moderator asking questions, following up, really digging into the responses that you’re getting. Now, the other alternative, which if you’ve been listening to this podcast, you knew it was already coming, which is short virtual focus groups, because I think that these are so helpful in allowing.

Nearly every lawyer going to trial access to jury research because we are conserving even more money and time by doing these things virtually, there’s no travel, no location fees, no videographers, Right. And everybody just tunes in on their computer. You run everything, share the screen. And again, we’re talking about the same kind of targeted presentations, jury selection, opening statements, Witness videos, it’s the same materials, the materials aren’t really going to change, you’re going to dial them back, right?

If you’re just going to do a one hour focus group, you’ve got to pick your pony. Which one are you going to do? Are you going to practice? And are you going to really then focus in on the target issue or the big worry that you have? Maybe it’s liability, so it’s going to be an opening statement based on liability.

Maybe it’s damages. But you’re really still doing trial prep because you’re taking all the information in, you’re organizing it, and you’re going to put some advocacy in it. You’re going to put it in a sequence. You’re going to try to be persuasive with the information, just like you would in a mock jury, right?

So we’re not losing out on that trial prep aspect, just by having it being one or two hours and on virtual. And again, We’re going to do the same kind of moderating. We’re going to get that instant feedback, that simple feedback, that discussion to help you learn more about your opening statement, your concern areas.

And then you can easily repeat it, make those changes, come back, do a longer one. You’re going to get a comparison of data based on, you know, being able to run these virtuals more often than doing in person. And Again, because of the flexibility of these short focus groups, you can start doing them, right, much earlier than 30 days before trial.

And you would want to do that because then you’re going to get more information and be able to integrate things and be, be much more ready for trial if it does happen. If you start a little further out and that’s kind of where these.

And again, even the better part here is you can do these things on your own. I will put a link to the show notes for our focus group, DIY episodes. So that you can do these without needing a consultant, right? Sometimes they make our lives easier, but sometimes we can’t afford them. That’s totally fine.

Listen, I didn’t ever hire a consultant when I did my own focus groups. I took the CLEs or took the classes. I went to the seminars to learn how to do these things so that I could do them on my own and I know that you are the same way. I know that you are the same way. That’s why you’re here, right? You want to learn the skills and do it on your own and that’s totally respectable.

We all have businesses that we need to run. We got to be very cost conscious in what we’re doing for our clients. And again, if you’re a personal injury, you’ve got a big risk here and you want to make sure that. You’re taking the right risks and that’s where focus groups help you make those decisions.

So two main examples I want to talk about here before we conclude this episode. Number one is attorney Ryan Squires. He did an episode with me, 35. It’ll be linked in the show notes where he talked about. His big verdict that he got, but what he did to prepare at the time it was in 2021 and so we just, all we had were virtual focus groups at the time that the trial was also going to be virtual.

So they did three virtual focus groups and in every focus group, they did opening statements. That’s all they did. And they were months out from trial, but what he explains in my interview is he had so much confidence. and felt so prepared because that opening was steel tight. I mean, they had dialed in their visuals, their PowerPoint based on what people were saying and being able to convey that in such a clear, simple way.

And they had a complicated case. It was a 20 year history between family members with hundreds and hundreds of emails about moving money and fiduciaries and investing. And so it was easy to get complicated and bogged down and overwhelm the jury with too many facts. And I think that’s why they came and they said, we’ve done it.

This is all we want to do. We just want to do opening statements. We want to get this dialed in and surefire. It was very well dialed in, you know, other things happened at trial, but they ended up getting a 40 million verdict in that particular case. The other example that I have is a lawyer that I work with.

In California, his name is Peter Levine, and he likes to build the focus groups. And again, they’re always still for trial prep, though, you know, we’re not, you know, things aren’t going to get started churning doing focus groups very seriously until we’re, you know, four or five months out. And then he’s kind of building, doing these one hour, two hours, three hours, and building on the information as we get it and continuing to test everything until, you know, we’re Again, we’re coming down to the last two or three and doing opening statements to make sure.

Right? We’ve gathered the information. We’ve listened to what the focus groups have said before, but also right, giving it back to make sure and test everything and, you know, having good success doing that as well, that the couple of times that we have worked together the past five years, mostly we’re med mals, but also all kinds of other cases as well that basically really end up turning up where the, they settled in the middle of trial or set it right before trial, but giving them the confidence to know what jurors were thinking.

So they can make that decision about settlement. So here’s the bottom line. You are not stuck with mock juries. Okay. It is not the only way to do trial preparation. And again, that thought that, uh, mock jury. Okay. But it’s so expensive. Like that forces so many lawyers out of just not doing them all together.

Right. Oh, this case isn’t worth it. Right. Now that’s an easy way to say, like, I’m not doing any jury research. I’m just guessing. So. Again, let’s go back. We’ve got two alternatives here. We’ve got our short in person focus groups and we’ve got our virtual focus groups. Because here’s what you need. You’re coming down to the wire.

You’ve had this case, you know all the facts, and it’s coming to the time of trial. We’ve got to make a lot of hard decisions about evidence and order of proof and final settlement offers. And what you really need is digestible feedback in short bursts, efficient with your time and your money that’s effective on the issues that are keeping you up and worrying you the most.

And it’s repeatable. Right? You can go back and repeat it and test it to really gain confidence and assurance that your case, when you give it over to the jury, is going to be the winning case. And that’s what we need, right? We have to give it over. Jurors are the ones that make decisions. So don’t walk in blind, right?

You’re not left out in the cold here if you don’t have money for a mock jury or a large data survey or, you know, one of the other large jury research products that are running around there. So I hope that this episode was helpful. I hope that you, you know, look at some alternatives and again, cool thing about virtual and even in person, you can set those up as well on your own.

The shorter versions make it easier and digestible for you and your staff to be able to put them together. So. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. If you did, I’m going to ask you to join the trial lawyer prep newsletter using the website that is listed in the show notes, www. laricklawfirm. com slash connect.

I send out an email just once a month, trial tips, strategies, extra resources. It’s really more of an in depth place where I put my thoughts on the same topics that we discuss here in the podcast. Okay, until next time, thank you so much. Oops, I meant to mention before we close out this episode right now in this month, I am doing a special offer to my email list.

For the on demand DIY virtual focus groups for beginners. However, I’m only giving it to the email list. So be sure and go to that website to fill out the form and get yourself on the email list for the emails that are going out this month. And you’ll get the added bonus for being on the email list. www.larricklawfirm. com/connect.

In this podcast episode, host Elizabeth Larrick provides guidance for individuals new to virtual jury research, focusing on starting with opening statement focus groups. Drawing on her experience working with lawyers and conducting virtual focus groups, Elizabeth explains how running a 20-30 minute opening statement session can simplify trial preparation and produce valuable feedback. She highlights the benefits of using virtual focus groups to understand case themes, address specific legal challenges, and improve trial outcomes, citing a $44 million verdict and a $22 million verdict as examples. Elizabeth encourages listeners to join her email list to access an upcoming on-demand course for virtual focus groups.

00:00 Introduction to Virtual Jury Research

01:44 Defining Virtual Jury Research

03:03 Starting with the Opening Statement

04:36 Benefits of Using Opening Statements

06:40 Gathering Feedback and Adjusting

09:53 Real-World Success Stories

12:38 Conclusion and Next Steps

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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

Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I’m your host, Elizabeth Larrick, and I’m glad you’re joining me today. This episode is going to be for folks who are new to doing virtual jury research, or maybe you’ve tried it out once or twice and you’re kind of unsure of what would be the next step in growing your virtual jury research knowledge.

And so today’s episode is about the easiest place to start if you’re new to virtual jury research. And I wanted to provide this episode because working with lawyers, running my own virtual jury research, I have found sometimes the biggest hurdle is knowing where I can start that’s easy and simple. And so in watching folks do focus groups and helping people run focus groups and mock juries, The easiest place we can start is a place that we know, which is the opening statement.

And I want to take just a quick moment here to clarify, what do I mean when I say virtual jury research? And There are so many options available now online and what I am talking about is when you put together a kind of small group of 8 to 10 to 12 individuals to come together on Zoom or whatever online platform you are using for a few hours.

Maybe it’s 1, 2, 3 hours, maybe it’s even 4 hours. And you’re going to moderate that group yourself, or maybe have somebody else moderate it in your office. And you’re going to really ask questions and get what I would consider qualitative, right? A lot more understanding what’s in their brains about their responses versus what could be compared to data surveys, where there’s going to be hundreds of folks who look at the evidence.

Maybe they listen to something and then they give feedback and you end up getting kind of a large data report. So this is the virtual jury research, which I normally talk about as focus groups, where again, we’re taking a smaller group of people and we’re really talking to them about their thoughts and kind of watching them discuss and deliberate in front of us with guidance through moderation.

And I believe that the solution to getting started if you’ve not done a virtual focus group is to run an opening statement. of 20 to 30 minutes. And again, let me just make sure that we’re coming in on the right and thing, which is most of the time when we come to a virtual focus group or coming to virtual jury research, we are stuck.

We’re having a problem in the case. Maybe we’ve got some challenging liability. We’ve got a, he said, she said, and The opposing counsel is being very obstinate about their point of view and their facts, right? So there’s kind of an impasse. Maybe there’s hard to value damages where it’s a unique set of damages, or maybe there’s some pre existing that makes it a little challenging for causation.

And of course, sometimes we have the other bucket that we hear sometimes about witness credibility and, you know, how is this. Person going to come off to a jury. And so why I believe that an opening statement helps you do this would be that you would create an opening statement that’s around this particular problem, right?

So it’s 20 to 30 minutes. We’re not going to run the whole enchilada here. We’re just going to do maybe the one taco plane. Okay. And that just means we’re going to tackle one issue. Maybe it’s just liability. And this is a very familiar. Virtual focus group that we run and I suggest to people who are new to coming to my focus groups and they’re going to do, you know, their own material.

And the number one reason why is we know how to do this, right? We’re lawyers. We’ve been talking about opening statements. Even if you’ve never done a trial, which is not unusual, by the way, you’re not alone in that camp. Like there’s a lot of talk. There are a lot of books. There’s a lot of guidance.

There’s a lot of examples that you can find. And so this is something that it’s not Something we have to go create that may be difficult for us. For example, when a lawyer tries to put together a neutral narrative, it can be challenging because we are invested. We feel very strongly about our side of the case, so being neutral and creating this neutral narrative can be difficult.

Also other things like cutting deposition clips and just creating a presentation that way, or even visuals, timelines, things that are not necessarily directly in our wheelhouse as lawyers, litigating lawyers. And so that’s why start where we know, which is writing an opening statement. And the other main reason why this is an easy place to start is because we have to do this really no matter what.

we are or where we are for trial preparation, we’re going to have to do an opening statement. And this step of sitting down and making yourself do a 20 to 30 minute opening statement on something very specific. Like I said, liability. Maybe it’s causation really makes you organize your thoughts, put it down, pen to paper.

We talk about that a lot, how important it is to, even at the first pass to write it out because it really gets things on the paper, out of your brain. And then you can really look at cutting things out. Remember 20, 30 minutes really makes us regulate how much information we can give, but also you’re going to put things in your case themes.

You’re going to organize that evidence in the way that you feel strongest about it, which is a great task to do. But also again, that then leads us to our third reason to do an opening statement as your place to start with a virtual focus group. Because it is so easy to understand the feedback, right?

You’re going to get uncomplicated, straightforward feedback about your case, your problem, and your award winning statement. Your case themes, like your evidence, if you think that’s the strongest, right? And so you’re really able to make this process easy on yourself by using the chat, right? So when we run an opening statement virtual focus group, the first 20 to 30 minutes of Is the opening statement and then the group answers very simple questions, like yes, no questions in the chat.

And then you begin the discussion where you just have a very open question. What do you think? And you get everybody’s feedback. And then of course the ponies are out of the gate at this point, right? And they’re all influencing self and it’s easy then to continue to ask questions though about what was confusing.

We heard a piece about how this person said it was a red light, but the other person said it was a green light. What do you all think? Or we heard that the main person who was injured was a passenger and they weren’t paying attention to what was right. Is that a problem? Okay, so there’s lots of easy ways to ask direct questions about your problems and get that feedback.

And of course, you know, the main question that we normally always have as lawyers is what am I missing? Where are the blind spots and what facts do you want to hear or know about that would help you make a decision? And so again, really simple set up one. We know, right? We write opening statements. We’re already organizing things in our brain about where we think the strongest themes are strongest claims and our evidence.

And then this just makes us put pen to paper and really organize it and again make the cut here. We’re going to have lots of information more than that fits in 30 minutes. Making you sit down and squeeze it into that 20 30 minutes really makes you analyze what is the best. and how to sequence it. And then of course, we want to start in a easy place that we can understand what feedback we’re getting.

It’s uncomplicated. Okay. And that’s why I love suggesting that lawyers who are new or lawyers who have maybe tried virtual focus groups and they want to take it to the next step, or they’re not really unsure what would be the next focus group to do an opening statement focus group, virtual focus group.

Um, is an excellent place to get started and feel successful. And that’s the thing too, is doing an opening statement leans into where we naturally are in a case. It leans into our advocacy. It’s okay to be an advocate in this situation. And of course, the flip on that is just make sure that a different person is asking questions, right?

Especially You know, it’s very hard to kind of flip faces in a focus group where you’re being a total advocate and then you flip to try to be neutral and ask questions. Just have somebody else come in and ask the questions. And again, you could write the questions out for your staff to basically just ask the questions and nothing else.

And still you’d be able to get that easy feedback. Understand, you know, did my theme hit or did not hit? Was this the best evidence or do they want to see something else? And, you know, the two main examples that I have are, you know, in the very beginning of the pandemic had a case here in Austin that was going to be one of the first virtual and so got together and really looked at, you know, How can we make this complicated case about a fiduciary duty simple?

And so they were very streamlined. The lawyers wanted to do just opening statements and we did three virtual focus groups just with opening statements. And by the time the case got to trial, they were actually able to do in person. However, they felt really strongly, very comfortable, very confident that their opening statement was basically going to nail the case down clearly.

Quickly and simply, and there’s no way that the defense would ever be able to come back. I think that’s absolutely true. They end up getting a 44 million dollar verdict in that case. And additionally, recently, and this will be upcoming on the podcast soon, my guest spot with Michelle Gessner talking about her case against Wells Fargo, where she again used virtual focus groups.

And using her opening statement, many, you know, over and over again, at least I think four or five times. Again, just tweaking it. And again, that’s another follow up with an easy, the next easiest one to do is to tweak that opening and come back, but her redoing her opening statement, uh, many times, and she talks about this in our episode together about how it really helped her one, understand her fame and her evidence, but allowed her to pivot.

Because she had done it so many times, she knew where the jury was, but she was able to pivot if she’d gotten objections, which of course she did in her opening statement. Uh, but that case turned out in a 22 million verdict. So, you know, the proof is in the pudding. This is the easiest one, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to get the best outcomes.

You are going to get simple, understandable feedback here. So, Here is the theme, which is it doesn’t have to be complicated. We tend to overcomplicate things as lawyers, but I really, you know, the strive in this focus group to make. I strive in this podcast to make it easy and simple to encourage you to start using virtual focus groups.

You think about this as jury research to help you make decisions in your case, get the feedback that’s clear and understandable to really help and ease your trial preparation burden earlier than that 30 day mark before and get some significant help so you can sleep better at night. Right. And that’s where this opening statement focus group comes in to really get your brain to organize everything, put it on paper, and then be able to feel confident in moving forward.

So I hope that this easy place to start our opening statement virtual focus groups will help you get started if you haven’t, or give you an idea for your next virtual focus group in a case that may be stumping you. All right. Thank you again so much for tuning in. I want to encourage everybody who is listening to join the email list.

The link will be in the show notes and specifically because right now I am going to be launching my on demand course for do it yourself virtual focus group, but I’m only launching it to my email list. And because I love my email list and my loyal I’m Folks over there, there’s going to be a bonus that is just going to be exclusive to the email list.

So check the show notes. It is www. larricklawfirm. com slash connect. If you are not able to check those show notes, get signed up and then you will learn very shortly about what is happening with that on demand course. All right. Thank you so much.

Depositions can be a big drag on case expenses! This episode is here to expand your toolkit and improve your legal practice with our guest, Karl Seelbach, co-founder of Skribe. 

Learn how Karl is transforming the legal field with Skribe, a tool to host virtual depositions and easily manage video depositions. Hear about the challenges that led to Skribe’s creation and how it is addressing common pain points like shortage of court reporters, high costs, and delays. Explore the evolving landscape of legal depositions and the features of Skribe’s AI-powered tools. Karl discusses the benefits and limitations of remote depositions, the issue of stenographer shortages, and how Skribe’s software offers a practical alternative.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Skribe’s creation to address deposition challenges
• The benefits of remote depositions
• The impact of AI-powered tools on deposition management
• Advice for integrating technology in legal practices

Follow and Review:

We’d love for you to follow us if you haven’t yet. Click that purple ‘+’ in the top right corner of your Apple Podcasts app. We’d love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast.

Supporting Resources:

If you would like to learn more about Skribe, you can email Karl with your questions: karl@skribe.com or visit https://skribe.ai/

Get results, spend less money. Check out https://skribe.ai/ for your deposition needs and remember to mention the Trial Lawyer Prep podcast!

Don’t miss an episode of Trial Lawyer Prep by subscribing to the newsletter here: https://larricklawfirm.com/connect/

The newsletter is the place Elizabeth share’s tips and strategies, PLUS exclusive offers.

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.

Check out the Video

Episode Transcript

Hello, and welcome back to the podcast trial lawyer prep. I am your host, Elizabeth Larrick, and I am excited for my guest today. He is making history in this podcast today. He is coming in as a defense lawyer, but let me tell you y’all, he has a very [00:01:00] clever and amazingly helpful tool.

He’s going to talk to us about so, but before we jump in, I let me introduce my guest, Karl Seelbach. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

Karl: Well, thank you very much, Elizabeth, for having me on. And I really like how you set the bar very low for me by introducing me as a personal injury defense lawyer. Probably has strong opinions, or at least maybe low expectations for for this episode.

So to go but up from here.

Elizabeth: Well, that’s true. Although, you know, that’s how we met. So we met doing a case against one another. And it’s been a Several years. I think you were with a different firm and you guys went out on your own and that’s awesome. And then now you’ve created this other really cool product that we’re going to talk about, but I want to give you a little shot, a little time to kind of tell, tell us a little bit about yourself.

I know you’re in Austin, just like I am. So, you know, tell, tell the group a little bit about kind of what you do and what brought you to this podcast.

Karl: Yeah. So I haven’t always been [00:02:00] a personal injury defense attorney. I often joke that I’m actually a plaintiff’s lawyer trapped in a defense firm. I went to law school to be a plaintiff personal injury lawyer.

That’s kind of what I thought I wanted to do and what I kind of aspired to do. I grew up kind of surrounded by plaintiff personal injury attorneys. My dad does safety expert witness work, and I met a lot of trial lawyers growing up in Henderson, Texas, who I respected and still respect. And who that was kind of my first exposure to law.

So anyway, since then, Yeah, I went to law school, ultimately started at a big firm, Winstead, a big general purpose defense firm doing all sorts of things, everything from finance and banking litigation to appellate litigation, some types of litigation that I found extremely boring, and then finally got a taste of personal injury work on the defense side.

And I just kind of thought, yeah, this is really where I’m meant to be, like the personal injury field in general. And so started doing more and more personal injury [00:03:00] and decided with a good friend of mine named Trek Doyle after, uh, about, I guess, 7 or 8 years of working with him to launch our own firm, which we did in 2015 and we actually did a fair amount of plaintiff’s personal injury work, which I think I can say this in hindsight now.

Um, every defense lawyer I think would be very well served to do some plaintiff’s work. I really think you, you get a real respect and a little bit of education of what that side of the V has to go through. One of the main things that I took away from it is when you’re the plaintiff’s lawyer on the case, You’re not just the attorney on the case.

You are the plaintiff’s counselor. You’re helping facilitate medical treatment. You’re, you know, potentially helping them figure out how in the heck they’re going to make ends meet while at work and they have all these. So I think going through that process of handling those cases really helped me better understand some of the dynamics that perhaps some of your listeners, you know, have to [00:04:00] deal with on a, on a day to day case to case basis.

And then you decided I don’t want to do anymore. Well, I decided to, so it was kind of interesting the way it happened. And I, and I really do sometimes feel like a plaintiff’s lawyer trapped at my own defense firm. Cause you know, I’m one of the founders. We had a lot of prior relationships from being at Winstead and also a lot of hooks in the water with, large companies, insurance, as well as some insurance companies, third party administrators.

And when we started our firm at first, you know, some of those relationships weren’t turning into work, but there’s a lot of hooks in the water, so to speak. And eventually, one after the other, after the other started coming in with, Hey, we’d like to retain you to represent this company or we’d like you to defend this employer.

And I think it’s extremely difficult to kind of ride the fence and represent both injured plaintiffs and defendants. It’s not impossible. There are some firms that do it. They tend to be really small firms or maybe [00:05:00] solos. I think it’s really hard. And it just felt to me that we needed to pick one. And the one that for me was the best business fit was helping these employers in particular defend against a workplace injury claim.

So in Texas, as you know, And some of your listeners probably know as well. You don’t have to have workers comp. And if you make that trade off and you don’t have it, you expose your company to negligence claims in state court or federal court. And so we defend a lot of those household name companies, fortune 500 companies when they get sued on personal injury cases in Texas and go up against a lot of great lawyers.

Also great, but most of the ones we go up against, I have a ton of respect for and really enjoy working with cases with them.

Elizabeth: Awesome. I appreciate the background and letting us know. And you know, it is true that when I was interning during law school at a defense firm, like they had one person because you have to really seal everything off and only one person was was allowed to do any plaintiff’s personally to work everybody else to defense.

So [00:06:00] that makes sense. And again, you kind of got to, uh, Pick your poison and go with it, whether it be plaintiffs or defense work, but we’re here to talk about this other super cool tool that you’ve created. So tell us about Skribe and what it is.

Karl: Well, so I’ll tell you about the inspiration for it first. So I’ve taken and defended hundreds of depositions in my career.

And one of the things that a couple of takeaways from that one is you should video all of your depositions. And if you’re not, you’re doing yourself a disservice. You’re doing the case of disservice. The reasons for that are there’s a lot of good reasons for it. But one is video is the most powerful form of evidence in a case.

And I truly believe that not only do juries expect to see it, but I think judges actually enjoy seeing it. No one wants to see a witness or a fake witness, for example. And what I mean by that is someone just get up and read a deposition transcript because a witness isn’t available. So we’re literally reading questions and answers, which believe it or not still happens [00:07:00] versus playing the video of the actual witness.

So it really helps inform everything from Demand letters during the case as it’s going on to be able to put video clips in your demand to kind of bolster it on the defense side. You know, I use the video in reporting to my client. So, as I was handling all these depositions and videoing them, I was kind of like, I found myself in this problem of not having a really easy and simple way to create video clips and share those clips, whether I wanted to share it with the court or with my client or in a response letter to opposing counsel’s demand.

And so one of the inspirations for Skribe was making it super simple to create and share video evidence, primarily testimony or other forms of video evidence, body cam videos. Recorded statements, whatever it may be. So it’s one of the things that kind of inspired me to start Skribe was that problem. The other piece of it was, I started realizing just how much money my clients were spending [00:08:00] on depositions.

And. Particularly realize that pain point when I started doing plunge cases where I was the one fronting, you know, the bill, so to speak, and paying those court reporting fees and those videographer fees, and I thought to myself, kind of got to be a better way to do this, like, surely we can use technology to speed up and simplify and reduce the cost to take a deposition to capture legal testimony.

So that was the 2nd reason was really cost. And then the 3rd was. You know, I’d go sit in all these depositions and I’d find myself and my team is, you know, we’ve grown now, we’ve got 15 attorneys at my firm. I found this common problem of, okay, when was that deposition taken? Why don’t we have the transcript yet?

You know, where is the video? Like, why am I still having to track down things weeks or maybe sometimes a month or more later that I can then go through it and clip it or whatever I need to do with it? And, you know, I kind of thought to myself. Not only do I think we can [00:09:00] solve the cost problem, we ought to be able to serve up a copy of the record synced to a transcript the same day a deposition takes place.

I mean, there’s no reason with today’s software that we shouldn’t be able to do that. So those are the things that my own frustrations with the process that led to the founding of Skribe. I mean, so I know technically when it’s Skribe When did it come out of the closet? When did it officially launch?

Because that was another thing I was really curious about. Sure. Sure. So the company was founded about two years ago. The first year was a lot of discovery work, due diligence, development work. We actually launched the product itself and I’ll get into kind of what the product is and what it does in just a second last year.

So it’s been about a year to a year and a half. I don’t remember the exact date off the top of my head, but I guess it’s been a roughly 18 months since we launched the product. And so there’s 22 products. Currently with Skribe, we have Skribe live, which is for capturing live testimony, such as depositions.

And then we have Skribe [00:10:00] library, which is a way to upload any audio or video file you have in your case and get a transcript and be able to search it and clip it and easily share those clips. Thanks. So those are kind of the two sides to the house. They’re very complimentary. You know, anytime you take a live event, it ends up in your library.

But, but, you know, my firm uses it. We have, I think, at this point, over 200 firms that have used it. We’ve done over almost 1000 depositions over the last year and a half. So it’s, it’s beginning to take off. And it’s really cool to see some of the feedback that we get that kind of validates. The problem that I was experiencing and that people, you know, that it resonates that people are they’re tired of spending too much money.

They’re tired of waiting on a copy of the record. They’re realizing that there are really awesome things that that software and technology allow us to do, such as creating video clips just by highlighting text. Putting those clips and demand letters to make them more persuasive or briefs to make them more compelling.[00:11:00]

And that’s really just tip of the iceberg. We have some other really cool features that we just launched recently that we can talk about in a minute. But yeah, I mean, it’s kind of off to the races. I mean, it’s a lot of fun. Yeah, and the reason why I was because I knew it was after, you know, kind of the pandemic and and and lawyers having to every lawyer having to use zoom no matter what to do hearings and whatnot.

And like, I know that. Thinking through like adoption of technology and lawyers. It’s like oil and vinegar. It’s really, really, you got to force us to really do that. And so like, you know, the almost like, you know, precipitous timing of Skribe and how many people realizing like, wow. And then. Also the cost, right?

The court reporter costs, the videographer costs. And, and I just remember in the, like, right when, you know, we had the shutdown and I was on a representative on, on a group for Travis County trying to figure out how do we keep trials going and. You know, we had all these ideas and, and one of the things, you know, the court reporters were like, wait a second, what about [00:12:00] us?

Because, you know, eliminating that person to person, you know, really was a struggle for them. And of course, many of the ideas just really weren’t going to work for anybody. And luckily we did, you know, there was zoom trial, there was some zoom trials that came along after that. So, you know, you guys obviously.

200 folks and growing. And I think that’s amazing. I, you know, I loved that when I went to website and visited, like, you’ve got a lot of awesome resources, but I just, you know, having the twofold, having the library, because there are still a lot of folks who need that technology that took those depots before, right?

I mean, cases are so backlogged. They can upload that stuff, have it sink to cut those clips and make life so much easier when you’re getting ready for trial. And then obviously. starting your depots now with Skribe to make it easier for, you know, and cheaper to do that. So tell us a little bit about, I mean, you know, kind of talked about the problems it’s solving, you know, what’s the feedback you’re getting, you know, what, what’s the pushback that you get to?

Yeah. [00:13:00] So, Well, you hit on a couple of things that I’m going to come back to, but I’ll answer your question first. The pushback is really one that is more education related, and that’s the concept of not all attorneys realize that non stenographic depositions are permitted in most states, not all. In Texas, in federal court, in over 40 states, non stenographic depositions are permitted.

Most of them are by rule. There are some that require stipulation, but Texas federal court as well as, you know, I think it’s over 30. It’s permitted by the rules. So, you know, there’s an education components to this because sometimes the knee jerk reaction is what do you mean? You’re going to use. Skribes have record this through zoom and there’s not going to be a court reporter.

How does that work? And so we kind of have to explain here’s the legal rules and why it’s permissible. And we have material that we can share with and we do share with all of our customers on that that explained. It’s been around for a long time. It’s actually been around since the nineties and historically, if you think back to depositions being [00:14:00] recorded, either with an old school video camera only sometimes or over the phone, even, but it just hasn’t been utilized as much because, um, Again, pre covid these depositions were in person.

You kind of needed someone to either type it or set up video equipment to record it. Now we can use modern software and computers to do some of that for us. You know, the other piece of this is in addition to educating not only our customers, but sometimes the opposing counsel on why this is permitted.

We also have to educate them on well, how does it actually work? And so that’s where we get into. Look, this is not a problem. Generative AI. It’s not just making up words that it thinks someone said. We are video and audio recording the testimony. There is a certified notary supervising the entire process end to end.

There’s redundant recording to make sure that there’s A backup copy of all the audio and the video in case one of the recordings were to fail, which knock on wood hasn’t actually happened. But there’s [00:15:00] redundancy baked into the process. And then we’re using proven ASR automated speech recognition to generate the rough transcript that is available within about an hour to two of the deposition.

And then within five days that gets human proofread and verified and legally formatted so that. The same week, no rush fee, no extra cost. The same week, you actually get a accurate final transcript that looks just like the transcripts you’re used to seeing, but you can file with the court if you need it.

So I think a big part of it is education. The other piece of it is You touched on which was coded and kind of how that shifted the market. I don’t think we would be having this conversation if Covid had not happened because, you know, against the way we’re approaching this market is with a remote first approach for purposes of hosting live events.

And that’s what enables us to provide this solution to attorneys because everybody has a laptop in front [00:16:00] of them. We can isolate for the most part, the audio to each participant and we’re able to capture a quality recording that we can then generate a transcript off of and proofread that transcript.

So it’s, you know. There’s a lot of bad things that came with COVID for sure, but I do think that the legal industry as a whole has gotten a lot more efficient as a result of COVID. And I actually believe, and I think we’re seeing firsthand, that attorneys are more willing to try new things and adopt new technology as a result of COVID.

Now I will say, Not every single deposition in the entire legal industry is right for zoom. Not everyone maybe is right for non stenographic. There is a place for stenographers in our legal industry and there’s absolutely cases where in person depositions do make sense. We just believe that that’s in a minority of cases that the vast majority, 70 to 80%, maybe as high as 90 percent are just fine over zoom and that the benefits, the efficiencies that you get [00:17:00] far outweigh, you know, what people think they get from that in person experience.

Absolutely. And of course, you know, I think a lot of my focus groups are virtual. So I am totally with you on like, you know, sometimes there is a barrier to what this must be done in person. And it’s like, well, it doesn’t. And I mean, it’s, uh, you’ve been on the other side too, to know, like, yeah, if you want to go take the other driver and they’re in Austin to go for it.

But what about those experts that are in California and New York and Washington? It’s wow. You end up You know, paying for time, but then also just that travel and the extra stuff. And plus, I was going to say the other thing I think that was, is we just have a real big shortage of core reporters. Yeah.

Yeah. I actually talked to note to not forget to mention that you on the timing, the timing was important because of COVID. There also is a legitimate shortage of court reporters, and it’s getting worse, not better. Now, you know, the size of the shortage is probably [00:18:00] up for debate. You know, the N. C. R. A.

National Corporate Association had reported it to be, I think, 7 to 8000 short court reporters based on demand. You know, there’s been rumblings. Well, maybe that was overestimated. The point is, young people, people in their twenties and maybe thirties aren’t going to stenography school at the rate that they used to, even though the number of claims, the number of litigated files continues to go up.

So, you know, it is absolutely a classic supply and demand problem, and it’s only going to get worse, which means. We need alternative solutions, which is where a software driven solution like Skribe can help solve that and help provide a cost effective alternative to the market. And, you know, I think that the other thing that it brings that I see particularly as a business owner.

So if any of your listeners, you know, or law firm owners or kind of equity partners, you realize that this, that speed is important, right? That the faster you turn [00:19:00] cases At your firm, the more cases your team can handle. Now, obviously you want to do it with quality, right? You don’t want to just rush through it just to rush through it, but every delay adds up, right?

So if you’re waiting a month or three or four weeks just to get a copy of this transcript, or you have to pay double or triple to get it faster, that has a cumulative effect either in cost to get a rush copy or in time waiting on, you know, this you to get a copy of this transcript so that you can move on to whatever the next step is, whether it’s emotion, whether it’s the next deposition.

So I think, you know, the way we look at it, skribe is speed is not just important, it’s a requirement. And so we put that kind of at the top of what we do. And a lot of attorneys that have that have joined and not just the attorneys, the paralegals, the other legal support staff members, they appreciate that with skribe, they don’t have to wait.

They don’t have to ask where’s the transcript or when will I get this? You You get it the same [00:20:00] day. And so you’re able to quit. We had one attorney actually San Antonio personal injury attorney, a great lawyer. I’ve had cases against him. He took a deposition with Skribe in the morning of a witness and then had another one that afternoon.

Well, during the afternoon deposition, he used video clips that he created. from the morning deposition and the defense lawyers, their mind was blown. They were like, we don’t under like, how did you do that? How did you get it that fast? But, you know, literally that is possible with Skribe. You get it that fast that you could take a deposition in the morning and over the lunch break, you know, start to chop it up, process it.

And, and later that same day use clips from the deposition and the next one, you know, that may not be something you need to do all the time, but it’s nice to have that option. Well, sure. And I think, I mean, I’m imagining a disputed liability situation where it’s like, these are the two key witnesses and they’re going back to back.

And like, at the time you think, Ooh, great, we’re going to knock this all out. But then you don’t think, [00:21:00] Ooh, well, you know, how do I then like, really, if there’s a problem, you know, solve it with being able to show them, Hey, here’s what the other person said. And this obviously solves that problem. Being able to say, Hey, literally this is what they said, but like, watch the video.

This is how they said it, you know? Yes, how they said it. That’s exactly right. What’s the body language? What’s the tone? What’s the look on their face? I mean, those are things that are not only important for attorneys to know and understand. Those are important things for us to be able to convey to our clients to show our experts, you know, for what you do to show focus, right?

Skribe enables, and we’ve had some of our attorneys use it for this purpose. Historically, video was underutilized. Why? Well, it’s the frustration I was telling you about earlier. It’s because historically video has been a pain in the you know what to work with. Difficult to chop up unless you took the time and effort to train on some movie maker software or video editing software or [00:22:00] you had some, you know, computer nerd in your office who could chop it up for you or you outsourced it and paid someone else to do it.

All of which slows you down. And I think by making videos so simple to clip and share, like if you can, to your listeners, if you can highlight a PDF, you can create a video clip with Skribe. If you know how to copy and paste a website address, you can share that clip with Skribe. So it really is just super, super simple.

And the 1 thing that I, that I do want to emphasize that we haven’t talked about yet. Step one was making it easier to capture testimony, share the video clips, and we’ve done that, and we’re growing that, and that continues to be a big focus of ours. How can we do that better? Step two, though, is we want to help legal professionals analyze that testimony.

And so we just launched An AI powered chat and analysis tool where you can go into a deposition, whether you took it with Skribe or you took it with someone else and you just uploaded the video into your Skribe account. Either [00:23:00] way, you can then query that transcript and ask it any question you want to ask it.

What did the witness say about topic X? How did the witness perform? How do you think they play to a jury? Based on this testimony draft sample discovery that I should send to the other party on the following issues or what you think are the top five issues and the A. I. will analyze the transcript and within seconds not only give you an answer, but the answer includes sourced video clips.

So, if I ask the chat bot. How did the witness deSkribe the injuries that they suffered as a result of this accident and how it’s impacted their life? Rather than me having to go search through the transcript, it’s going to summarize what the witness said on those two issues, and it’s going to create video clips.

Witness explains can no longer go bowling or play with their kids or whatever it may be. So I can see the summary and click the video to watch where the witness actually [00:24:00] testified about this topic. So we actually just launched that just two weeks ago and are just starting to get feedback on it. I’ve actually used it in my firm for about the last month.

And it’s just such a time saver. I think it’s good. I really believe that that feature alone is going to be the dominant way that attorneys search their depositions. I mean, like, forget keyword search, forget, you know, the indexes at the back that we used to use of the P. D. F. Or the printed, you know, binder copy.

You can now find exactly what you need just by asking the software, and it’s going to pull it up, summarize it, and give you a clip of the corresponding segment. And so for folks like wondering, okay, well, is this, you know, and I, I feel kind of fancy because I just learned this, is it in the silo by itself?

You know, like nobody else, you know, unlike if you go to Google Gemini or ask, you know, I’m going to say Ask Jeeves, but [00:25:00] that’s, you know, ago, Elizabeth. That’s no it in? Like you got, you It’s in my repository or it stays there. It doesn’t actually have access to anything inside the internet to pull an answer for you.

So there’s a couple of parts to your question. So I’ll answer the first part of your question first, which is, I think more data privacy focus. If I was understand where you were getting at, we do not use anything that is submitted to Skribe to train large language models or to train, you know, some other law firms like customized model.

So we’re not, in other words, we’re not using. Questions that are submitted to or data that submitted to train the AI. It’s it is, um, the models already been trained and we’re not using fresh data to train the model. And then the 2nd part of your question. I’ve admittedly forgotten it’s in a silo, meaning like there, you know, it, [00:26:00] the.

is in there. My depositi then me, you know, it’s i I like if I go to google going to take anything I it’s nothing, none of tha Okay, I read your question Well, you used it correctly, but I was thinking I’ll explain what I was thinking. Just second. The answer to your question is Your data is not shared with anyone else.

The data that you submit isn’t used to benefit or provide access to some other firm. Like, in other words, if you submit a deposition transcript of some expert witness or something that is extremely confidential, you don’t have to worry about that showing up in your report. in some other firms answer when they chat with some transcript, even if it’s the same expert, right?

It doesn’t become a part of the source material for the large language model. So hopefully that answers your question. Now, one thing that we do plan to do in the future, we don’t have this yet, but in the future, we do plan to offer custom law firm models to where you [00:27:00] could begin to train your own law firms model and feed it more and more and more data.

So that you can get silo just for your firm customized answers. And so, you know, step one is to get something useful in users hands, see what they like. What did they not like? One thing that our team at Skribe does a great job of is listening to customers. So, you know, if some of your listeners want to test this, let me know.

I can get them set up to test it. and let us know what do you like? What’s missing? You know, what do you wish was a little bit different or better? Or, you know, does it solve your need? I know, you know, it solves a lot of mine, but every attorney has kind of a different wish list of the things that they like or that they want to see.

Some of the things that are on the road map are the ability to search across the entire case, So to be able to basically figure out, like, for example, you know, did this witness testify in a way that’s consistent with these other witnesses and have the analyze across multiple transcripts and [00:28:00] spot either consistencies or inconsistencies or things like that.

So. You know, a big part of Skribe’s mission is to, to really change and modernize again, not only how we capture and share testimony, but also how we analyze it. So we’re looking at all the different ways that we as a company can help attorneys and their teams do a better job at taking the depositions, do a better job at analyzing those depositions and hopefully do it at a lower cost than what they’ve been paying the last, you know, 10 years because the price to take a deposition in the old fashioned way really has gotten super expensive.

Yeah, it’s extremely cost prohibitive. If you are running a solo to small size firm, I mean, it’s really difficult, especially like some of the costs for all the stuff and. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I think Skribe definitely solves, you know, an efficiency, you know, a cost perspective, but also I think a lot of people, I think you’d be surprised how many people still do not videotape depositions.

And I’m in, I’m in the camp with you. [00:29:00] I mean, I learned very early on videotape everything, and this really gives. actually an opportunity for solo small firms to video everything via zoom. So let me ask you a look because sometimes this happens and this may have may not have happened to you before, but I’ve seen some video clips where you may have a witness who, you know, they are using their iPhone and they’re in a car doing a deposition.

You know, The video technology. Is it just kind of like, Hey, whoever shows up and how they show up, you’re just kind of stuck with that? Or is there any way to really kind of modify that? Yeah, so it’s a great question. So two parts of that one, we’re not, we’re not as a software company going to modify anything that’s recorded.

So, you know, we’re going to be preserved, not only preserving and saving. We also certify like through an affidavit. the authenticity of the non stenographic record, which is the recording in any digital exhibits. Now, the first part of that is more of a threshold issue. What is an acceptable level of quality in [00:30:00] audio and video?

And we do have standards. And that’s one of the reasons that right now we have, we call them liaisons, the certified notaries that help facilitate the event end to end. They have standards that they follow to make sure that the Uh, the people that need to be on camera, on camera, that the witness is framed, that the audio quality is strong and will interrupt politely if there is a problem along the way, if someone’s audio connection drops or their video feed drops or staggers, you know, no technology is perfect.

No human is perfect, right? I mean, like I get stenographer transcripts are used to when we were using more traditional core reporting methods that did have mistakes in them. From time to time, I would say more often than not, I would find some type of mistake. Now, sometimes it wasn’t a big deal.

Occasionally, it was a big deal. The nice thing about doing non stenographic depositions is you have the audio and video. So that’s kind of the source of truth. That’s one of the big reasons. I’m such a fan of the video. Not only does it convey the [00:31:00] tone, the look on the face, that all those other things that maybe you don’t get from from the text on the page.

But it’s also the source of truth. Like if there’s a dispute about what a transcript says, we’ll just play back the video. So I think it’s, you know, it’s a great solution. There’s no perfect solution. There’s pros and cons with with everything. There’s trade offs. But I really do believe that The future of how we capture testimony and analyze it is going to be software powered.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be a human component against and our first absolutely have a place in the industry. Proofreading by human absolutely has a place in the industry, but. What we’re seeing through real users is the quality of the rough A. I. Transcript has gotten so high that you can get the substance, analyze it, clip it, share it, do all the things that you really need to do to move the case from point A to point B.

without ever even looking at the final transcript and really only [00:32:00] use the final transcript. If you need to file something with the court or if the case is actually going to trial and it’s time to start doing your page in line video cuts and page in line designations. I just want to echo something you said because This is a huge like fear point for a lot of lawyers because all I do almost all we do a virtual focus groups we have some is and that is like like using technology so the ability that what you I just want to echo it because you Skribe provides a person who will help you with your setup your witnesses setup and make sure that they sound clear like that is amazing that is such a huge bonus point because I know there are lots of times Cause I, we all had to kind of start using, you know, notaries on zoom and they just get in there and get out, like they don’t help you.

Like, so that is a huge bonus to have someone, if you are worried as a lawyer, cause sometimes we forget, oh my gosh, share screen or things like that. And [00:33:00] so having somebody else in the room was always going to be there to help with, you know, and make it so the lighting is right in this, in the square, That is so helpful, especially you don’t necessarily always want to be that person who says, Hey, witness who you don’t know, but I’m a lawyer.

Like I need you to turn the light on in front of you where, you know, it makes it a little bit easier for the lawyer to have that off their shoulders. Yeah. And we should like the competent Skribe tries to be very Customer focused and friendly and how we handle those issues. Like, for example, if this were a deposition and our audio and video connection kept going in and out and in and out the way we handle it is we just offer to reschedule at no cost.

Like, look, do we need to figure out a different day? Or does someone need to drive to a different location to get a stronger Internet signal? I mean, we really want to make sure that the clients and the clients being the scheduling attorney. and the opposing attorney have a good experience with Skribe, get a quality recording and ultimately see the benefits [00:34:00] of our solution that we offer.

Not only speed, not only the cost savings, but some of the other things that we talked about that will help them analyze and use the You know, their video in ways that maybe they don’t even imagine. I mean, you know, I remember the first time I filed something actually was a mediation position statement and I had sent this mediation position statement and there were quite a bit of deposition testimony in this case that was pretty critical and I’d put video clips into the letter into the word document and we’ve got tutorials on how to do that.

It really is simple. It takes seconds, but I had it. Pulled up Microsoft Word on one side of my monitor, the Skribe app on the other side of the monitor, and created these clips, and I remember showing up to mediation, and the mediator was just like, what out in the world did you do that? I’ve never seen, like, that was so helpful for me to be able to actually watch the witnesses testify about the key issues in the case.

You know, not only did I get the substance, but I was able to gauge my perception of their credibility, how they [00:35:00] present it, how they might present to a jury. And so it’s kind of like, I’m a techie. So I always, you know, I’ve used technology for so long. You start to take certain things for granted, but I do have to remind myself as well as the Skribe team from time to time that a lot of people have never done this.

They’ve never seen it, you know, video used this way. They’ve never, maybe they’ve never even used AI chat in their business life at all, like to analyze anything, much less a deposition transcript. So, yeah, that kind of goes back to the education component of this. And 1 thing that we offer is webinars for any law firms, like, we’ll come in and typically it’s a zoom based webinar where we will explain how the software works, the ways that you can leverage it in your practice.

And we even have some CLE accredited webinars as well, where you can get some credit, even, I think one of them even has ethics credit too. So it’s a lot of fun. Well, I know that, you know, the website itself and we’ll put like links in the show notes and all that good stuff has so [00:36:00] much good information on it.

So if somebody wanted to get started, like, what’s the best way to get started? If they’re still curious, like, tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So two very easy options. So one, you could literally just go to the website, which is Skribe s k r I b e dot a I. And you could click schedule now at the top of the page and fill out the information with your email, the date of your depo and the name of your witness.

And that would Can I kick off an email to our support team and get you in the hopper? So to speak, the other option is they can email me. I’m happy to take an email and, you know, kind of do a handheld introduction to our team. My email is Karl also with a K at Skribe. ai. So either one, if they mentioned your show, we’re happy to provide a discount as well for their.

First deposition or their first upload if they want to just upload existing video, whether it’s a deposition or some other type of video, they’re welcome to kick the tires that way and we’ll provide a [00:37:00] discount to any of your listeners on their first Skribe usage. But I will say that I think that 1 thing that you mentioned that I want to maybe mention to your listeners is attorneys who aren’t videoing their depositions.

I completely understand the pain point of you signed up for a deposition with court reporting company A B, whoever they are, and you’re annoyed or frustrated that to get a video copy of the deposition, you can’t just press record. On the zoom or the court reporter won’t just press the record button on the zoom and that they want to charge you an additional substantial fee to have a videographer sit in and just press the record button on the zoom.

In addition to sending a court reporter to sit there and type the transcript and really that is 1 of the other frustrations that led to the founding of Skribe. That exact scenario happened to me about 3 years ago where a court reporter. She was very nice. [00:38:00] It wasn’t her fault. She was just the worker bee that had been sent to type the transcript.

I asked her if she could press record on this, this expert witness doctor deposition. And she just said, well, they won’t let me do that. You know, and I don’t see that a videographer signed up to be here today. Anyway, long story short, there’d been a miscommunication and you know, they were going to have to reschedule the deposition, pay a rescheduling fee.

And I finally just got fed up and I was working with a plaintiff’s firm out of Houston and they were very cooperative. And I said, why don’t we just hop on my zoom line? I’ll record it and I’ll share a video with you, me, and I’ll share a copy with the court reporter. And so we did that. And the very next day, I picked up the phone and called my co founder at Skribe, Tom Irby and said, okay, it’s time to start this company.

Like, this is, this is BS. There has to be a better way. Yeah, that is, I mean, so many, that, that particular irritation is really one of the things that I think has just really gotten out of hand with You know, [00:39:00] got just the cost of pursuing a case and then having, like, just this little nickel and dime. Oh, well, you can’t push the button, like, really, you know, turned a lot of people off.

And again, you know, like you said, there’s totally a place for court reporters. But some of those practices that have been happening after the pandemic was just like, oh, wow. Oh, you know, so I’m glad that you brought up that pain point because I know a lot of people listening. I’ve had that had that exact feeling of like, wait, what?

I can’t just push this little button here. Like, The other practice, this is just some pre advice to your plaintiff lawyer listeners. And this is not the goal here is not to necessarily intentionally compliment what you do or kind of feed you more work. But one of the things that I tell plaintiff’s lawyers is I get these demand letters, right?

And I had, you know, my team has a lot of cases were sifting through these, these settlement demand letters that, you know, have big numbers in them. And, One of the things that I truly do believe genuinely is [00:40:00] underutilized is two pieces of advice I’ll give your listeners. One, putting data in your settlement demand to help justify your numbers.

You can get the information. Go do a verdict search on a verdict search tool and get some sample jury verdicts or, you know, if you have access to, you know, sample arbitrator awards, whether that’s through or some other listserv that you can get some examples, you know, maybe redacted with party names, but some examples of what some arbitrators have done in similar cases.

or jury verdicts or bench trials. That really does help when a defense lawyer has to go in and justify their ask as to why am I recommending this settlement range. It’s not just numbers that have been thrown into a demand letter. The plaintiff’s lawyer has actually spent the time and trouble of putting some data into their demand.

We may not agree with it. We may find some other examples that are more favorable to our side, but at least it’s real numbers. And then the other piece of advice [00:41:00] I would give your listeners is not every single case across your entire docket. Probably merits doing a focus group or study group, but there’s a lot of them that do.

And it’s amazing like what you can do if you take modern technology, like some of the tools we’ve talked about today and create a highlight reel of look, we’ve now taken 5, 10, 15 depositions, whatever, whatever. Create a highlight reel of all those key testimony of the key moments, put that together along with kind of, you know, an opening closing, whatever else you want to do and get it in front of some people in the real world and see what they think.

And, you know, you may get some gems from that and that you can then use and put in your demand letter and say, Hey, we have focus group this case and Look, here is why we’re demanding X million or whatever it may be. We’re not just making this number up or pulling it out of thin air. We have gone to the trouble of actually pulling [00:42:00] verdict samples.

We’ve gone to the trouble of doing a focus group. And here is the feedback that we’ve got. And I think if, you know, attorneys would roll up their sleeves and do that work, they’ll be surprised at some of the results. I really believe they’ll get, you know, higher settlements as a result if they do that instead of just, you know, again, not all attorneys do this, but I get so many demands that are just fluff, fluff, fluff, you know, super inflated medicals without any, they come across as detached from reality.

And it makes it difficult for me to do my job if I don’t have some concrete examples or, you know, some focus group feedback, something that I can go to my. whether it’s an in house council or a risk manager or a third party administrator, whoever it is that I’m reporting to and say, here’s what they’re going to present.

And here’s kind of where they’re coming from. And here’s the work that they put in to get there. So anyway, I just wanted to share that with you. I’ve gone on a couple of other Podcasts where the audience tends to be [00:43:00] plaintiff’s lawyers. And selfishly, part of the reason that I offer that advice is it makes my job easier as a defense lawyer, when I have to digest all this and report it, you know, up the chain to the people that I work with.

I think you kind of nailed it when you said it’s, you got to show your work. And, you know, unfortunately this is not necessarily always true, but It can be that it’s just a form demand letter with some zero stuff. And it’s, and it really does make your job difficult. And that’s what I always tell people.

It’s like, listen, like, you know, you can’t just set, you got to show, you know, you got to show them. And so I appreciate you saying that. And again, you know, the verdict search is super easy. Join a database, you know, it will pay for itself like over and over and over again. Um, Because we mediate every case, right?

So, you know, if you’re going to mediation or doing that, and of course, you know, I personally, of course, love focus groups, and not to beat a dead horse, but just [00:44:00] just know that, like, the person that actually controls the purse strings. probably did not sit in on the depositions and probably doesn’t have the time in their schedule to watch an entire deposition video start to finish.

And the defense lawyer may or may not actually have the technical skill or competence or someone on their team to show clips of the deposition video. So if you get, if you have an extremely sympathetic client, right, who testified in a way that everybody would love or sympathize with or whatever it may be.

Or you crucified the corporate representative for the other side and the person looked angry or like a lying liar or whatever it may be. You just got this really good deposition testimony and made him look like crap, you know, on video or your witness is amazing. Take the time to create some clips of that.

Put it in your demand letter so that the [00:45:00] people that are actually authorizing the settlement authority on your case see it right so that they have the ability to quickly and easily click a link and watch it. Because it’s one thing for me to tell an in house attorney or claims manager that I think the witness came across as very sympathetic, or I think our defense witness did not present well, and that I don’t think they’re going to be the best witness for us.

It’s an entirely different thing to show them and let them watch it for themselves and make their own assessment. And so again, it kind of comes back to one thing we started the show with, which is You know, video is such a powerful form of evidence. And I think that with modern tools with using focus groups, you can really leverage video in ways that, you know, historically were took a lot of time money to do.

You can do it a lot more effectively and efficiently now with software. Yeah, absolutely. And again, like we are a society of videos, like the [00:46:00] number two, I think search engine is YouTube. Like we are a video. We, we expect it like right now. So that makes sense, you know, putting in your demand letters. I love the idea.

You said earlier as well, like send it to your mediators, you know, like they’re going to appreciate that, especially like, Hey, I got five clips. It’s going to take you less than five minutes. It’ll tell you everything you need to know about the case. Like, perfect. Save everyone some time. So. Well, awesome girl.

Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I know that Skribe is going to solve so many awesome problems, but the number one being like, let’s get video testimony and let’s make it at a reasonable price. As long as also sinking, like, I think that’s also super helpful. If you have depots that have not been synced yet, so we will put your email, we’ll get the, the, the website put in there and the only other plug I want to Again, the website is so helpful and one of the cool things they already have up there for anybody who wants it are notices, like literally verbatim notices for [00:47:00] states where people are using Skribe.

So don’t even worry about having to create a new, new notice. They already have it up there on the website for you. So you guys are taking a lot of pain out of using this new, awesome tool. And I really appreciate that. Yeah, well, I appreciate you having me on the show and give me a chance to explain a little bit about, you know, what Skribe does, but also why it exists.

Like, what, why in the world did we start the company? What problems are we trying to solve? And, you know, hopefully some of that resonates with your audience. I think it absolutely will. I can tell you that as those are definitely some pain points that we have, you know, speaking collectively as a plaintiff’s lawyer.

So again, thank you so much, Karl, for joining the podcast and I hope everybody takes a chance to go to Skribe and take a look at it. Maybe use it for your next deposition. And until next time, thank you so much for listening.