Focus Groups v. Mock Trials: There Is a Difference
Are you ready to redefine your understanding of focus groups and mock trials? Let’s dive into the subtleties and key differences between the two, as we expose the secrets behind effective case preparation. With exclusive insights from expert attorneys, medical illustrators, and visual aids specialists, we’ll be enriching your knowledge and honing your skills.
Don’t miss our intriguing foray into the world of legal jargon as we dissect the merits of focus groups over mock trials, shedding light on the importance of creating an open environment for participants. We further delve into the strategic use of background checks and surveys in your practice. Bring in your queries and join me on LinkedIn as we start this thrilling journey into the realms of trial preparation.
In this episode, you will hear:
- Focus groups vs. mock trials
- Early focus groups in lawsuits
- Dedicating time and resources for learning
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Episode Transcript
Elizabeth Larrick: Hello and welcome to trial lawyer prep. I’m your host, Elizabeth Larrick, and thank you so much for joining us. I’m going to call this the official episode 100. Well, I know we did a replay. Last week, I want to make this the official 100 [00:01:00] episode and say, cheers. And congratulations.
Cheers to you for listening for pretty much two years now. Podcasting. Thank you so much. I couldn’t do this without you. And congratulations to me for putting it together. I know that here lately, it’s been a little hit and miss, and I appreciate everybody hanging in there with me. We’ve making some changes over on my work side of things, and that has translating now to some changes for the podcast.
And so what I want to talk about really quickly is some announcements. Before we get to our meat and taters of the episode changes would be, we’re going to move to a format of every other week. Now what we’re going to do though, is have just a little bit more meatier. episodes. Okay. What I want to do is start flavoring in some specific case study episodes.
Now, these may [00:02:00] be with the lawyers who are actually involved with the cases, or sometimes it’ll just be me talking about the case, you know, the outcome, but more specifically the preparations, right? And how maybe those things helped what was learned. Of course, if we can’t our lawyers on, we totally will.
To talk about that, kind of dive into that and really kind of get into the how to’s, you know, pulling this lever equal this, you know, pushing this way equal that to really kind of give y’all the audience very much a how to, right? That’s what this podcast is about, is really talking about the how to preparation for cases.
We’re going to continue to do interviews with lawyers, of course, and folks who help lawyers. So I know that I’m going to have medical illustrationist, Annie Gao, come back. We’re probably going to do a couple episodes on illustrations versus animations versus a couple of things that she has up her sleeve to help y’all.
I know that [00:03:00] we’re going to have other folks that help for visual aids beyond medical and probably some other people here and there just to help maybe with thinking about business wise or things that we can delegate people to help us with that. Also, of course, I’ll be here doing some solo episodes, you know, lessons learned and how to’s.
So, as always, I just want to talk about who this podcast is for, and it’s for folks, trial lawyers, people who are litigating cases, pretty much plaintiffs, lawyers, personal injury, employment lawyers, and also business litigation. Now that’s not to say I, family lawyers cannot also gather up a lot of this thing, a lot of these things that we’re talking about, but I do know having dabbled in family law is just a little bit different style of practice, if you will.
Of course, there are some people that this podcast may not be for, right? So this is for folks who are curious, who want to learn more, who want to see something, try new things. And so for folks who may [00:04:00] be down the road a little bit in their practice, who feel like they got a pretty good handle on things, not so sure, certain about trying new stuff, this may not be the podcast for you.
Of course, you’re welcome to hang out and listen, happy to have comments and feedback as well. My email will always be in the show notes for that, as well as I’m going to ask that we all start connecting on LinkedIn together. I’d love to hear more from the audience in this next year coming up. And so I will ask for that, that we connect on LinkedIn.
So with all those announcements down, let’s get to the meat and taters of this particular episode. So I do speaking quite a bit. And I always enjoy going to talk to a trial lawyers association. Got to talk to Montana this year and have brought some of those things that I talked about here on the podcast and probably bring some more along the way.
But recently I went down and spoke to the San Antonio trial lawyers association, which is great [00:05:00] organization full of wonderful folks. And we talked about. DIY virtual focus groups, a topic that I have talked about here on the podcast several times and you know, kind of can collaborate those episodes and put them in the show notes for you.
But what really kind of came from the conversation in this discussion with these lawyers was very much more about focus groups versus mock trials. Now, a lot of times when I talk about things, I’m talking about focus groups, but in lawyers minds they’re thinking mock trials. This kind of impasse or miscommunication happens often.
And that’s because my mentorship and my learning came through the avenue of focus groups. Not the adversarial style, the mock trials where [00:06:00] we’re getting, you know, basically a group of people and we’re having, you know, sometimes even having a judge there and having the opening statements, you know, showing some witnesses, having some closing statements, voting, you know, maybe having deliberation along the way.
That’s a mock trial to me versus a focus group. And. That’s why I want to talk a little bit about that today for people to know that there is a really huge difference here and what I advocate as you’ve heard if you’re listening here very often is for focus groups because and a lot of do it yourself focus groups, especially when it comes to virtual, but before we Jump there.
Let’s just stay really quickly with our focus group concept. People talk about doing focus groups along the way. If you’ve read, and I’ve mentioned on this podcast before, winning case preparation, understanding jury bias, they [00:07:00] talk about doing concept groups. That’s a word for them. I just sometimes call them, you know, neutral focus groups, but basically you’re taking a very small approach.
Either maybe it’s just an issue, a very digestible approach to getting feedback from potential jurors. And then that’s why I call them participants because I’m not going to ask them all to agree to one point of view. Rather, I’m going to go through and get each of their opinions and then dig a little deeper as to where that may be coming from.
Right. So it is very much a quantitative, right? Am I saying that right? No. Qualitative, right? It’s not about the numbers, right? Because there are people who do that too. And they do it very well, by the way, like great groups out there that do a very big number of people, good sample size and push everybody through and give you some great metrics.
That’s not what I do. I’m much more qualitative, right? So [00:08:00] we’re going to work with the group and really understand and get each of their opinions and go through that when it comes to these smaller issues. Right. So again, it becomes this very digestible format where we’re maybe spending an hour. Maybe sometimes it’s even 45 minutes on an issue or a neutral fact pattern or a visual aid or witness clips and just mulling through impressions and thoughts, assumptions like really just kind of diving in what their opinions and thoughts are without any advocacy, right?
Very much a neutral base. This can be difficult for trial lawyers because we advocate. However, with a very smaller digestible approach, with a neutral approach, you can do it or staff can do it. I know a lot of lawyers are incorporating staff, paralegals, legal assistants that can run focus groups for them because they Again, come from a unbiased place.
[00:09:00] They’re just there to ask the questions and get the feedback. And so it becomes a very different, I consider it a very big difference between a focus group and a mock trial. When people come to me and they want a focus group, I’m assuming you want a focus group that you don’t want a mock trial. And so we have that conversation.
But what I love about. focus groups for plaintiffs, personal injury attorney, for employment lawyers is a smaller, digestible, cost effective way to start talking to potential jurors, start understanding their attitudes and their backgrounds. Again, the, it’s a lower, Smaller time, you know, we can have smaller groups and of course, this is why I always push for virtual because that is an extremely cost saving convenient for you and for our focus group participants that they love way to get this feedback.
And if you do it [00:10:00] earlier, right, traditionally mock trials are left for the very last stages. Like you’re going to trial, no possible way of settlement or the possibility of settlement is so low that you want to make sure you’re ready. So then you’re doing a mock trial. You’re at the end stages versus a focus group because again, smaller in nature, different kind of style can be done virtually.
You can do it in person. You can do them more often and earlier. I always advocate, you know, six different spots, but I’m going to say for sure, no matter what two, Gots to do it spots. And the first one is before you file. Now, you may be thinking, well, I don’t have all the information and I don’t have this and I’m not sure what people are going to say.
You got a pretty good read on the situation before you file. If you have enough information to file a lawsuit, you got enough information to run a [00:11:00] focus group. And the cool thing about when you run it this early in their case, you get a lot of mileage out of that feedback. Because you’re going to, See it over and over again.
Also, you’re going to get a blink read, a blink reaction on Settle vs. Trial very, very early on, and that can really significantly help you shape and style your case expenses, your effort. Your energy in a case before things get too far. The other place that I say absolutely run a focus group is after you have key deposition of testimony from key witnesses and facts, fact witnesses.
So that would be our parties and a corporate rep. Going beyond that, like we probably don’t need it unless we’ve got like a super complicated so we need some managers in there or something like that because then you’re able to basically truly take clips and give. The focus group, [00:12:00] more information just through those clips.
You can always read them. This is what someone says. This is the testimony. You could even show, hey, here’s the black and white testimony on a screen. But actually having them watch even a five minute clip of somebody talking, they’ll gain so much more information. We, we know that just humans in general, we gather information from nonverbal, verbal, it’s more nonverbal, but that really will help you then see how things are lining up.
If you put all those key witnesses in a focus group, and then just. You know, ask them, what do you think, who’s, who’s right, who’s lying, you know, all that good stuff. Very general opening questions. You are really going to help significantly continue to shape your case and the themes and what works, what doesn’t work, find the holes that maybe still be missing.
So those are two really key spots. Now again, you can run these yourself. I encourage people to do that. I go to the website. There’s a download that I give away that [00:13:00] has. Information about how I do them for virtual confidentiality sheet questionnaire that I use because it’s just the return on the dedication of time and money in a focus group is exponential, like exponential, right?
So let’s say you, you spend 1200 bucks on a one hour focus group. And you learned three things. Those three things could be case saving information, right? They could save you 50, 000. They could add 100, 000, right? So that return on investment is fantastic. The only other place I think that we get A return on investment that is as good as a focus group is a background check.
That’s only because in my line of previous practice, I learned like as much as people try to [00:14:00] remember, we can’t remember everything. And it’s not that people are lying to us, but they may not have remembered that bankruptcy that they had 25 years ago, but you gotta know. So that’s what a background check helps you with.
Um, and is a great return on investment, by the way. If you’re not doing them, start doing them, you’ll be so glad that you did. So okay, back, back to this. So you may be thinking, well, but with a mock trial, I’ll already know like, no, you could learn a bunch of stuff in your mock trial that you can’t change at all.
Like you’re at the point of no return. That’s, that’s a problem. You may get a lot of graphs and a lot of charts and a lot of. emotional information. And that’s great. Totally great. I’m not discounting mock, mock trials are great. I love doing them for people, but I’m again, this episode is about their differences and that there is a big difference.
Sometimes you just want to hear them talk. You [00:15:00] just want to hear what they have to say. And when you have a deliberation where you just. You know, you get to actually watch them deliberate, make decisions. That’s great. But when you’re able to moderate and you’re able to give everyone a question and give them space and set the rules so that everybody gets to have their own opinion, one person can say it’s purple and the other person can say it’s green.
As a moderator, I mean, I get to follow up and ask how come right, but sometimes you can’t do that in a deliberation. And sometimes you can see people getting stifled and that doesn’t happen when you have moderate when you’re moderating in a focus group, right? You get to take time for each person and learn more about those opinions and create a very open environment for it, even if people are disagreeing and that’s kind of the hard part.
Sometime with deliberation. You, you can’t necessarily do [00:16:00] that. And then you kind of lose out on that person’s feedback and that point of view. And you, you want to get everybody’s point of view because you may have somebody like them that shows up on the jury panel. And that’s just good to know. You want to hear as much as you can or possibilities because once you get up for jury selection, you will have heard some of these things before.
There won’t be a shock factor, but also you’ll kind of know how to navigate it. And that’s again, just one of the other main differences between. mock trial versus focus group, you, you get so much more, and I’ve talked about this before, you know, what have I learned? Like you get really good at hearing bad stuff when you do focus groups, because people will just tell you, you know, they’ll dump all over it.
And that’s one of the fears that lawyers have. And I think one of the reasons why people are not running focus groups is because they’re going to hear bad stuff. And we get so invested. Trust me. I was there. You’re investing your time, your [00:17:00] energy, your money, your hopes that it’s hard to overcome that.
Lay it out there in front of a focus group to hear the bad stuff, like, been there, done that, tried to run more focus groups to get different outcomes. It, it was, you know, hearing it over and over again, does that necessarily, you know, then you come to a little bit like, okay, got to come to the truth that this thing needs to settle.
I do not need to try this case. Also, I’ve run way too many focus groups, which was another thing I told people in San Antonio. Like, Hey, trust me. If there’s somebody who’s run too many on a small case, that’s me. I’ve been there. I’ve done that. I don’t want you to do that. I know how to avoid doing that.
Okay. So if you have questions, call me about that or schedule a time on the calendar. All right. So that was, again, one of my major takeaways from talking to the San Antonio trial lawyer association was. There [00:18:00] is a difference here between focus groups and mock trials. There is. an expansive way that we can, as trial lawyers, start using this tool earlier in our cases.
We can set up our own system to do it, and we can start getting information to make better decisions in our cases. Learn if we need to settle it. Learn if we’re going to need to try it, right? Find the holes that are there, and do so at a level that makes more sense for our practice, right? Whatever your practice may look like, we all have to be cost conscious, right?
Especially when we’re taking on the risk as plaintiff’s lawyers. So let’s look at how we can better dedicate our time and resources, learn early with this tool so that we can use all that information and get as much mileage as we can out of it. All right, lots of mock trial versus focus group here today on this episode, and I hope that it was [00:19:00] helpful.
I hope that, like I always say, we’re just kind of opening the door just a little bit when it comes to, Oh, we’re not talking about mock trials and focus groups are not the same thing. They are not. They’re not the same thing. They’re different and they’re wonderfully different and they’re great in different ways.
So if you have questions, please don’t hesitate to email me. And like I said, please join me on LinkedIn, follow me, make a connection request and let’s connect on LinkedIn until next time. Thank you so much.